ASSEMBLING PANORAMIC PHOTOS

06
PEET SIMARD
Hardware used
Canon EOS-1Ds digital camera
17– 40mm zoom lens and 19mm wide-angle lens
Manfrotto 303 panoramic head
Gitzo Explorer tripod
Power Mac G4 with 450 MHz dual processor
Software used
iView MediaPro 2
Stitcher 4.01
Photoshop CS
Debarrelizer Photoshop plug-in
On the
Boulevards
Photos
Assembly
Final image
I
’ve always wanted to photograph this intersection of two of
Paris’s great Haussman-era boulevards, especially from a low
angle and with a field of about 200 o . But I couldn’t do it,
neither with a Hasselblad XPan (no perspective correction lens;
field of view too narrow) nor a Sinar (no wide-angle lens wide
enough). I tried and failed with a 15mm fisheye lens on my
Canon 1Ds: I used the Imaging Factory’s Debarrelizer plug-in to
turn the resulting picture into a horizontal, but the edges were
too stretched and the picture wasn’t sharp enough to blow
up. (The photograph had to be printed in very large format for
an exhibition). To solve the problem, I turned to assembly
techniques. RealViz’s Stitcher program is excellent, because it
can assemble low-angle pictures shot with a wide-angle lens
while straightening perspectives and correcting optical
distortion.
Paroramic assembly completes a landscape photographer’s panoply
of shooting techniques, and does so
without requiring awkward or costly equiment.
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