Panoramas

Now and then I like to try something special and make panoramic pictures. I own a Nikkor 10.5mm fisheye which allows me to build really immersive panoramas. The only problem is that I have to haul a tripod and multiple lenses up the mountain, which at my age is something you only consider when the weather is perfect. The last few years the opportunities have been scarce, but I have a large collection of panoramas I made earlier, which will find their way to these pages in due course.

Let me tell you a bit about my “process”. The pictures are taken with my old and trusted 12.3MP Nikon D300. Depending on the projection I am going for, I use the Nikkor 10.5mm or the Nikkor 16–85 zoom lens at 16mm. The 16mm is ideal for cylindrical panoramas with high resolution of 18000x4000 and a limited vertical field of view of about 70°. The 10.5mm gives a resolution of 12000x6000 with a vertical field of view of 180°. A quick calculation shows that in both cases the panorama covers the sensor about 6 times, so the resolution on the horizon of the cylindrical panorama is about 2.5x that of the immersive. The immersive panorama is, of course, a nice gimmick, but it wastes a lot of precious pixels on the blue sky and the floor. So my preference for landscapes goes to the cylindrical panorama, with the additional advantage that the result can be printed.

All panoramas must be shot from a stable (and therefore heavy) tripod with a spirit level. For cylindrical panoramas that must accurately track the horizon, any deviation from the horizontal cuts into the field of view, resulting in a very narrow strip indeed. Immersive panoramas, which have to deal with objects much closer to the lens, will always suffer from parallax that can't be corrected in post.

Exposure is another tricky problem. The sun will be in the frame of at least one of the pictures that make up the panorama. It will be overexposed and generate lens flare. For an acceptable flare, make sure that the sun is dead center in only one picture. I always switch to manual exposure and manual focus and calibrate at an angle of 90° to the sun. This is the only way to achieve matching exposure, focus, white balance and color rendering. Oh, and I always shoot raw, because you really need all the dynamic range you can get.

The raw pictures are then developed in Capture One Pro (without lens correction) and stitched together with Hugin into a 16-bit TIFF file. The post-processing is done with Affinity Photo, which results in an 8-bit TIFF file since I want only one JPEG-compression in my flow. The final step is converting the panorama to a 3D-projection for use on this website. For this step, I trust Pano2VR, which produces HTML5 output and a JavaScript player.

The final result is a multi-resolution 3D panorama with an approximate file size of 40MB that can be embedded on the following pages. I decided to put four panoramas per page. That does not mean that just visiting a page will immediately load 160MB. Instead, the player will only load the low-resolution tiles for the previews, which comes to about 5MB per page. Moving the previews or zooming-in will load additional tiles on demand. So it is pay-per-view. The panoramas also have a full-screen option that is entered/exited by double-clicking (desktop) or double tapping (mobile) on the preview.

Enjoy!