And now for something completely different: HDR Panos!
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Earlier this year I traveled to Northern Italy with my trusty camera, panorama head and tripod to capture a bunch of high-resolution 360° HDR panoramic environments.
This has really been a labor of love for me, its the first project that I have seen through from initial r&d, getting out in the field and capturing the shots, processing, and then finally setting up the marketing material. Basically I did everything but set up the technical/distribution side of things (which Mark Doeden of Marmoset was kind enough to do), so I am extremely proud and excited to announce the finished product.
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The pack contains 50 HDR captures for $60, suitable for use in Skyshop, Toolbag 2 and any renderer that can load .HDR files for image based lighting.
Find more info and download a free sample pano at the official product page: http://www.marmoset.co/panos
Thanks to Andy Davies at Knaldtech and Tanner Kalstrom at Game Textures for putting my panos to good use showcasing their products.
Replies
More images, these are all the panos:
And this is how I make them
Haha no that's a reasonable question. Its actually pretty hard to get out of the way of the fisheye lens, as it has a 180 degree diagonal field of view.
Basically though, I just make sure to always stand behind it. So I take a shot, move the camera, and myself, take another shot, move, etc. When it comes time to take the up shot I have to duck below the camera, and for the bottom shots I have to stand as far away from the camera as possible. I take two down shots though, so I stand on either side and can mask myself out.
Its funny how often I unintentionally end up in shots though.
It's something I've always wanted to do myself, but whenever I go visit any intresting place it's too crowded and i don't have enough patience
Yeah that is actually one of the most difficult aspects of doing this, avoiding people. I basically would just try to go anywhere that people weren't, so I ended up in a lot of back alleys and places like that. Then a lot of the time I have to wait for people to pass so they are out of the shot too, occasionally I just photoshop them out as well.
But its really difficult to take panos in any of the more crowded, popular areas. Vence was nuts, I would pretty much just walk in the opposite direction of where all the people were going. Getting up really early in the morning or late at night helped as well. I think I got up at 5am in Venice, by 6:30, everywhere was packed, but before the sun came up nobody was out.
Thanks for taking these.
Top quality panos ftw!
Good question. The camera I use (Olympus OMD EM1) can take 7 shots bracket at 2 EV increments, which is what I do. A nice benefit of the EM1 is that it can take all the shots with one shutter press, which is handy. Depending on your camera, you may be limited to less shots, or say, 5 shots at 1EV. In which case you might want to get a remote that can automate bracketing like a promote (or install the magic lantern hack on Canon bodies), as I find 7 at 2EV is just enough for bright sun, and 9 shots would be even better.
Now, how to set the exposure range. The first thing you need to do is figure out the fastest shutter speed. On my camera that is 1/8000, which is good, many dsrls only do 1/4000. The thing to remember here is you need to fit your exposure range within the limits of your shutter. 1 stop means you need half the shutter speed, 2 stops means you need 1/4th the shutter speed. So for every set I take the shutter speeds look like this:
1/8000
1/2000
1/500
1/125 - this is my baseline, I set my camera to this setting in manual mode
1/30
1/8
1/2
If your camera maxes out at 1/4000:
1/4000
1/1000
1/250
1/60 - baseline
1/15
1/4
1
From the base setting, your camera should automatically take 3 exposures faster, and 3 darker. One of the problems here is that at those lower shutter speeds like 1/30th and below, any subject movement will result in motion blur. So you want to avoid wind, people, cars, really anything that moves. I use a manual focus lens, so the camera can't set the aperture in bracket mode, if you use an AF lens it might be a little more flexible than this, that might also depend on your camera.
So those are the shutter speeds I use for basically every shot. To set the exposure or overall brightness, I change the aperture on the lens. Generally you want to stick around F8-F16, beyond F8 and the photos will be less sharp due to diffraction, below F8 and you may not have everything in focus. So another thing I do when shooting in bright light, is I attach a 4 stop ND filter to make the scene much darker, this way I can use a wider aperture without blowing out the images.
At the end of the day you want something like the top here:
Usually I do a few test sets in the field to nail down the exposure range before taking the rest of the shots.
This image, and the gif a few posts up are from a tutorial that I'm working on that explains the entire process.
MAW MAW MAW!
I got lucky and stumbled on that cat in a secluded courtyard, he was nice enough to sit perfectly still while I got the 7 shots in. :poly142:
Only bad part is now I have to pay the cat royalties.
Yeah, doing it all manually is a huge pain, I've tried to do that myself but its too easy to bump the camera slightly when changing settings, and its just really slow so any sort of subject or cloud movement ruins it. Also, yep, using ptgui to stitch.
Very cool!
I've finished up the panorama photography tutorial.
Check it out here: http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/hdr-panos