Creating Panoramic Images - Continued
For creating interior panoramas a specialized bracket that aligns the cameras rotation to its “nodal” point (explained later on)
Panorama animated and published with StillMotion PE
After you get your exposures determined you will take overlapping images of the interior, which will be “stitched” by your software to create the panorama. Advantages of stitching over using super wide-angle lenses are as follows:
- No fisheye distortion
- Higher resolution by combining images
- Does not require specialized software to show
The tricks to good panoramic images are a leveled camera, properly positioned camera on a tripod and sufficient overlap in the image segments.
Advanced Techniques
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A Panoramic Rig |
It is also important to have a tripod that will allow your camera to rotate on the “Nodal Point”. The nodal point is the point inside your camera where the light rays converge and flip over. When shooting a panorama it's necessary to rotate about this point to eliminate the image mismatch caused by parallax error. This will become more important if you are creating panoramas of small spaces with short distances to the camera, here the “parallax” can be noticeable. You can buy a “Rotator” head for panoramas for around $200.00 or go to your local hardware store and make your own for less than $10.00. You will need to experiment to find the nodal point by pivoting the camera at different positions until you find the best spot. (Try placing the pivot point at approximately the spot where the lens is attached to the camera first) There is more information concerning this at
http://www.edb.utexas.edu/teachnet/QTVR/NodalPoint.htm
Don't let this section scare you. You may get perfectly good results from you existing camera tripod section when the camera is mounted in the horizontal position.
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A typical commercial panoramic head |
TIP: When your are capturing an image, identify in your mind a feature in it about one third from the right side of the scene. Use this feature as the start for you next image. You wont need any additional costly hardware to manage the overlap. We recommend about a third of the image in over lap for good repeatable results with most stitching programs.
Digital imaging is both art and science. The best way to learn it is to do it. Creating your own panoramas whether for real-estate or vacation scenes is worth the effort.
The next article in this series will discuss how do build and display interactive tours that can contain panoramas and standard format images.
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