Top ten most viewed immersive panoramas

As some of my followers will know, I regularly create immersive panoramas of places I visit. I often share these using google maps as that is one of the only places that can actually show them on a variety of platforms and that doesn't use flash or java, both defunct technologies with major security issues. Anyway, one of the interesting things is that a lot of people apparently see these spherical panoramas and hopefully enjoy them. I thought I'd share these with you as a top ten. Unfortunately I can't embed them in here easily so you'll have to click the links to be immersed in them and hit your back button to get back to this page. When you open one of the panoramas, remember to look up and down in addition to around you. Some of these have some nice surprises in them. Enjoy!

990,507 views: Tarn beneath Mount Toll

This is a small tarn above Blue Lake in the Indian Peaks Wilderness. This panorama has been viewed 990,507 times. Yes, close to a million times!

787,930 views: Emerald Lake

This is Lake Emerald in Rocky Mountain National Park closely after sunrise. This is one of the first of these panoramas I ever made but I only recently uploaded it to Google maps.

492,690 views: Santa Elena Canyon

The mouth of Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National Park. You can see Mexico across the river. This point is quite famous and photographed many times at sunrise. The Rio Bravo river forms the border between Texas and New Mexico and was often a crossing point in the old west for outlaws to escape the US and now it is a crossing point for illegals to come into the US. You can just wade over basically. Big bend is a place I want to visit again sometimes for photography.

291,152 views: Andrews tarn and glacier

This is Andrews tarn and Andrews glacier in Rocky Mountain National Park

249,557 views:Blue Lake, San Juan Mountains

This is Blue Lake in the San Juan Mountains near Telluride. There are several Blue Lakes in the San Juans and this is the one that can be reached by hiking from the Bridal Veils waterfall power station.

127,557 views: Blue Lake, Indian Peaks Wilderness

Blue Lake sunrise. This is Blue Lake again in the Indian Peaks. The view is as very few people see it. At sunrise and almost wind still.

85,227 views: White Pocket

This is White Pocket in the Paria Canyon/Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, an absolutely amazing place. It is hard to reach with many miles of deep sand road to get through but well worth it in the end.

65,350 views: Little Hawaii

Little Hawaii. This is a "secret" waterfall close to Telluride in the San Juan Mountains. It is right next to a very popular trail but you would never guess it's here if you don't know about it. Locals know all about it but will not divulge the location. The GPS location I tagged on this image is not where it is supposed to be in respect of that.

53,482 views: Mount Falcon open space

Sunset from Turkey trot trail in Mt. Falcon open space near Morrison, Colorado. This is one of my favorite mountain bike rides in the foothills.

36,638 views: Shelf Lake

Shelf Lake approaching storm. Shelf Lake is a spectacular high alpine lake in Rocky Mountain National park that is only reachable through off trail travel. I got chased away from here by some thunder and lightning that day.

I hope You enjoyed these. Be sure to click through and look all around you.

Can you stitch waterfalls?

When you use the stitching method that I do to create high resolution images, one thing to remember is that this works well in relatively stationary subjects. A subject that is not very stationary in general is water. However, when you do the soft water thing by using relatively long shutter speed, you can stitch the resulting images really well. The below image from Beaver Brook in Rocky Mountain National Park (truly a hidden gem - more on that later, too much backlog) was done that way:



This was right around sunset on a very cloudy day, so it was already quite dark in the dense forest and at f13, the shutter was already at 2 seconds. Perfect for such a waterfall. I took 9 images at 50 mm in 3 rows of 3 all 15 degrees apart in both directions and these are the individual images.



I purposefully develop the images in a bland, low contrast, low saturation manner in order to make the image easier to stitch without posterization, blown out colors and such. It gives me more freedom afterwards in other words. The images were exported to 16 bit prophotoRGB tiffs from Lightroom and stitched in hugin (far better than Photoshop for this purpose but much harder to learn) to give the result in the first image above. The field of view is equivalent to a 18mm lens on a crop camera or about 28mm on a full frame camera. Since the resulting image after stitching is more akin to a 4x5 ratio image (there is more overlap vertical than horizontal) It is more instructive to quote the focal length in 4x5 view camera terms, where it is akin to a 115 mm lens. Interestingly, this method allows you to dial in camera movements, and even (sort of) shift the focal plane around if you know what you are doing. It is cumbersome, but helped by the low weight of the total gear and the flexibility in post that you have. It is much harder to visualize the final result though than on a ground glass plate. You do get incredible detail though as the below screenshot demonstrates (click for full resolution:



Just check the guide image to see. Printed at this size, with the detail you see on your screen if you open the above screenshot, the print would be about 70 inches (i.e. 6 feet or about 1.8 meters) high, which is just astonishing I think. This is even more poignant since I did not stitch the image at the full resolution of approximately 70MP in hugin. You will never need it and Smugmug (my hosting service) only goes to 48 MP anyway.

This method is quite a bit cheaper than getting a 10k$ Pentax 645D (that's before the lenses). I would still love one of those though as that is a fantastic camera from everything I read about it.

Finally to answer to the post title is of course a resounding "yes."

Assembling a high res image

I was playing with Lightroom 3 beta and discovered that you can now set the background color in a print layout. Excellent! Also, I just happened to generate the following little grid of images that make up a larger panorama. I thought this looked quite nice actually.


I develop these images very flat on purpose to enable better panoramic stitching.

Assembled using hugin and after doing some post treatment just in Lightroom this becomes the following.

This image is 7500x9930 pixels. I have this in a gallery over here, where you can order prints from it. Because of its very high resolution, you can print this image extremely large without loss of quality.
As I promised earlier, when I have time I'll write a little tutorial on how you can do this.

EDIT: playing with the images in LR 3.0 beta, I created the following. This is the top middle image in the collage above but edited individually. This is using the Adobe Standard profile and very modest edits (mostly the blacks and a small amount of added vibrance. I sometimes find such images in my sets that were unintentionally composed quite well.

Resolution of stitched panoramas

I got inspired by an interesting post on Luminous Landscape about medium format digital and the new numbers on them posted by DxOmark. Because DxOmark does not account for actual resolution, the medium format backs appear to do worse than many current DSLRs. Of course, that is not a correct comparison as the whole point of these backs is resolution - the one thing the test does not measure. The article goes overboard with a flawed comparison to audiophiles but hey. These medium format backs are a superb solution for landscape photographers that want to shoot digital. They are just very expensive. For what they offer probably good, but very far out of my reach. A good alternative would be a large or medium format film system, but that is not my preferred style mostly due to the difficulty or cost in getting acceptable scans. My solution to this dilemma has been stitching. I either shoot handheld or use a little jig that rotates my camera around the nodal entrance point. A better solution would be a tilt-shift lens, but those are quite costly. I was curious how my method would compare to the medium format backs. The highest resolution these offer is 39 Megapixels. Here is a recent example I made using my D300 and a 24 mm lens (the kit lense zoomed to this value!)



This image is rendered at about 41.4 Megapixels, which is about half of the 105 Megapixels that it would be when rendered at the full resolution from hugin. The field-of-view is equivalent to 10 mm on a crop sensor. Here is a 1:1 blowup from the area marked with the red rectangle.



As you can see superb detail, even at only half of the maximum resolution. Even though I would love a medium format digital system, for now, until I win the lottery, this stitching method gives me outstanding quality. The medium format would be free of the problem that you need a subject that doesn't move (fast running water is not an issue BTW as you can see here or here).

Unwrapping a fisheye image

One of the fun features of using a fisheye lens is its enormous distortion that disproportionally enlarges foreground elements. I own the Nikon 10.5 mm fisheye for DX cameras. After my wideangle was destroyed because of a car that drove over my backpack recently, I was forced to use it more often with my camera that had a defunctive commanddial because of the same incident. Also, since my new D300 included a license for Capture NX, I can now easily unwrap fisheye images. You can do this too for free with hugin, but this is much easier - just a single click. As an example here is my daughter taking a picture of me in Arizona with the fisheye:

I'm always amazed at the beautiful creamy skintones that this program and the in-camera jpeg engine gives. You have to work on this in other RAW converters (not just Lightroom). Anyway, here is the rectilinear projection.

Pretty cool. In this case, I think I prefer the fisheye image anyway, but it is a good illustration.

Redid sunrise panorama

I just redid a sunrise 360 degrees fully immersive panorama I made at Emerald Lake. I combined multiple sets sets of exposures for this result. The old version had the sunlit area blown out.

I turned this into a nice QTVR too, but I don;t have a good place to host that yet. I'll post it when I do. When I took these photos, I hiked up from the trailhead far before sunrise. Always fun, especially when it is snowy and icy ;-). For these 360 degree panoramas, I use the awesome 10.5 mm fisheye and a homebuilt device that can be seen here:



I stitch using the awesome open source/freeware hugin using enblend.

Simulating a wide angle lens by stitching

This is a photo of a sunset in the little park around the corner from where we live (for a larger size, click through to the flickr page). I just shot 5 pictures by hand equalizing exposure and white balance setting. I later stitched them together in hugin and did a very minor amount of processing in lightroom. I kept it understated on purpose.



One of the nice things is that by using the rectilinear projection in hugin, you can effectively approximate an extreme wide angle lens. The widest I own is 18 mm on my 1.5 crop factor DSLR. This corresponds to about 27 mm on a 35 mm camera. Not that wide thusly. I would love to get myself something wider such as the wide tokina, but for static or relatively static objects, this approach works quite well and you'll get superhigh resolutions as a result. Much higher than you can get out of any current DSLR, even including the just announced full-frame canons and Nikons. This image, when stitched at the highest resolution, corresponds to about 32 Megapixels.

New Panorama from Canyonlands

I finally got around to creating another panorama at Canyonlands. Taken just after the sun had gone down. I needed to combine two sets of images two stops apart to two different panoramas and do some simple HDR-like processing (just a blurred mask based on the lightness) to get detail in the canyons and the color in the sky not blown out. I did some PP in Lightroom. Luckily I had shot three sets of exposures at -2, 0, and +2 stops on the tripod, so I just had to combine the panorama once for one set of exposures and simply use a texteditor on the hugin file and combine the second set of exposures. The only thing I needed to do was to make sure the handheld nadir was correct (which was unfortunately not very sharp because of the long shutter). Anyway, here it is: Click on the photo for a larger version at flickr if you care to see it. This image should only be seen large!