Pano Play

Lately, I have developed an interest in more fully utilizing the tilt-shift lenses I own, as they enable one to very quickly and easily assemble a small panorama. Theoretically, in order to avoid all parallax errors, the camera should be shifted instead of the lens (and there are, in fact, some tilt-shift lens collars that allow this by mounting the lens, instead of the camera, to the tripod). But this issue really only comes into play when there are objects close to the camera. And, since this is my first foray into panoramas, I wasn’t going to compose that way or worry about it at this point.

My photo friends and I had the opportunity to shoot at the Cathedral of Learning last Sunday and I assembled this panorama, which is made of three overlapping vertical images with the camera in the horizontal position.

Importantly, I see the benefit of this type of panorama as getting the perspective of a longer focal length lens with a wider angle of view than that lens would normally be able to provide. In this particular case, I was able to use my 90mm tilt-shift lens to photograph with a 90mm perspective, and stitching the images together allowed that perspective to exist with a wider angle of view.

I could have fit the entire scene into one frame using a wider angled lens, but then the perspective would have been that of a different focal length. Imagine shooting a large room. You could use a wider and wider focal length lens to get it all in, but then objects further away would look tiny. With a longer focal length lens they would not look as distant and the entire room could be included by stitching multiple images together. For me, the benefit is in increasing the angle of view and not related to getting a larger image in terms of megapixels, as I already have as many as I need! For reference, this image is 7654 x 9355 px in size.

View fullsize

Cathedral of Learning © Howard Grill

I had never used Lightroom to assemble a panorama before and I have to say I was quite impressed. It rapidly stitched the three images together with seams that were totally invisible no matter how hard I looked! I will be playing around with panoramas a bit more and trying to find out where they are most useful with the type of photography that I enjoy.

On another note, I have typically processed these Cathedral of Learning images in black and white, but, for some reason, this one appealed to me in color. Perhaps that is because of the contrast in color between the stone walls and the wooden bench and stairs, as well as the contrast between the lighting above the bench compared to the light on the back wall.