Panoramic photos

[Tony]

Just a look at where the tech is today. No real fancy equipment needed; just a digital camera.
http://www.360cities.net/

Some reading at the bottom e.g. How to make one of these panoheads for $2.

Nothing at all on the map yet for WV. Who's got a camera?
http://www.360cities.net/map#lat=39.01918&lng=-77.42065&zoom=7

[Willis]

The pano head design on which I clicked seems a tad involved (I didn't look for the $2 version) and I note that the users with cannon and nikon slr's will get the best results. I'd hate to do it "Half-Fast" with my little camera. But I'm willing to work with someone to help find spots to shot. Something like that might even warrant finagling access to some of the higher spots in the towns and County OR renting a lift from Jefferson Rentals. If any of you guys feel the urge, contact us. We (S&B) might be willing to put a wee bit o' dough toward the project. Finding the locations would seem to be the most challenging task.

[Kensey]

For shots where nothing's particularly close the camera, a pano head is probably overkill. I've gotten decent results just holding the camera and turning around in place.

[Tony]

Ya, but I'm thinking back to that absurdly distorted railroad track (http://www.shannondale.org/forum/showthread.php?19012-Panoramic-Jefferson-County-APUS-starts-to-sprout) in one of the recent panoramas posted. Would using a panohead really fix that?

[Kensey]

Ya, but I'm thinking back to that absurdly distorted railroad track (http://www.shannondale.org/forum/showthread.php?19012-Panoramic-Jefferson-County-APUS-starts-to-sprout) in one of the recent panoramas posted. Would using a panohead really fix that?

Nah, a panohead is strictly good for fine-tuning the alignment in shots where that level of detail matters -- it won't fix barrel distortion or normal perspective skew of straight features that track across the image. It's really a kludge to make a regular camera fake a panorama better -- real panoramic cameras are built for the purpose (http://www.funsci.com/fun3_en/panoram2/pan2_en.htm) in one of several ways.

[Tony]

Fascinating article. One back atcha: http://www.bophoto.com/lessons/pano-one-shot.html

[Kensey]

One of the things that article mentions is the fact that the reflective-shape method captures the instrument as well (in fact by definition this will be the most detailed part of the image if the shape is convex to the camera). I wonder if it might not be possible to set something up like a reflecting telescope -- light bounces off a primary mirror, then off one or more secondary mirrors to the observing point. Substituting a sphere for the primary ought to be possible. That way you could avoid the camera being in the image.