Baldachin by Night II
during the past few weeks i’ve been thinking about the panorama i’ve shot of the baldachin near the railway-station here in bern. i’ve thought it would be very nice to have a nightly version of the same panorama. so, yesterday evening i again spent some time on the bubenbergplatz and shot quite a bunch of images. i’ve had two lenses with me, the newly aquired 16mm zenitar fisheye which makes shooting panoramas a breeze, since the FOV is so big, but is actually quite a hassle to setup, since it’s a fully manual lens, so more suited for this task than for snapshots. in addition to the zenitar i’ve had my trusty 38-80mm zoom lens
the first results from my mini-photo-safari can be seen in this set here on flickr. most of the images are shot with the zenitar, but the important one is shown here below:
the image is humongous (600 kB), so you need to wait a little bit until it loads. to close the pop-up, scroll toward the far right!
again, it’s a panorama, this time shot and composed from 123 images in total (really!). all the images have been taken yesterday evening from 21:35 until 21:45, so if the setup is good, you can shoot a panorama like that in 10 minutes, including waiting time until all the cars, busses and trams are where you want them…
the panorama is — again, as the one shot about three months ago in the afternoon — composed from three exposures for each position, hence i’ve covered the field of view with 41 images and fused the images down to one enhanced exposure with enfuse built into hugin.
i really need to get a nice very wide angle lens, since shooting panoramas with the zenitar is really a breeze, apart from the manual setup. this panorama has been composed from only three images and looks already quite impressive. really impressive — in my opinion anyways — is that shooting a full 360° panorama of the bubenbergplatz only requires 10 images and about one and a half minute and can be seen below (444 kB):
the full 360°-panorama is of course much nicer in the fully interactive view, provided here.
# Bastian on June 1st, 2009
your panos are stunning! wait a second that i can close my mouth ;)
i like the second (darker) pano but it’s a bit grainy especially when you keep your eye at the dark ground. did you use a higher ISO in the second pano?
# Peter on June 1st, 2009
Great shots! Thanks for pointing me to this enblend enfuse stuff. I was hugin using before but most of my panos are made with autostitch. See some of the on my flickr account.
# habi on June 1st, 2009
@bastian: thanks for the compliments. especially from you, from someone who shoots extremely good pictures, this is appreciated. i’m still struggling a bit with the fully manual mode of the zenitar-lens, so the second panorama might not be ideally exposed that’s why it’s grainy. and additionally, my camera is sat to auto-ISO at the moment… the first one is fused so you get the ideal pixels from each exposure, thus less grainy.
@peter: thank you also! autostitch is not available for os x, and hugin is much more powerful for what i use it. if you’ve not used hugin for a long time you should give the beta-version a try, it has come a long way. and if you’re interested in the insides of enblend/enfuse, you should watch the technology talk about enblend/enfuse by its main programmer, andrew mihal.
# Peter on June 1st, 2009
Well the technology of hugin is perfect, but the handling ist much more difficult then autostitch and it is slower. An advantage is, that you get the single picks and can select the masks yourself with photoshop. Autostitch seems to me having performance if you are stitchting in two dimensions as in this example.
# rouge on June 1st, 2009
Great Pictures!
# habi on June 1st, 2009
@peter: as i’ve said, hugin has developed quite a bit, the image shown above is actually composed from 123 images, 41 for each exposure. the images are aligned in a 4 * 11 grid ( * 3 for each exposure…). oh, and autostitch is not available on the mac (at least not for free, it’s built in into calico, which costs 40 $).
@rouge: thanks! now you’ve got a new image you can use as a background for your blog :)
# rouge on June 5th, 2009
@habi: I would absolutely like to but unfortunately I changed my design yesterday :-(
# habi on June 5th, 2009
i’ve seen it, it looks really nice!
# Harry on June 7th, 2009
Hi Habi,
great panos, especially the 21:35–21:45. Apart from the immaculate technical implementation, the atmoshphere of the pano is fantastic.
Harry
# habi on June 8th, 2009
hi harry,
sorry, your comment got caught into the moderation-queue. thanks for the kind comment! i hope i’ll soon be able to stitch it really big :)