Category Archives: Photography

360° Panoramas (again)

March 18, 2021 Gary 4 Comments

In my last post, already several months ago, I promised another 3D printer post. That is still coming. It’s half written. Make that a quarter written. I’ve been sidetracked, not to mention that my laptop computer bit the dust and I haven’t yet decided what to replace it with.

My first 360° panorama post was a little over a year ago, Feb. 4, 2020, where I discussed how 360° panoramas were made and showed one from Gates Pass near Tucson, AZ. My second post on panoramas was written on March 9, 2020, noting that 360° panoramas could be displayed on YouTube.

So, what’s new with panoramas?

First, 360° can be displayed on Flickr (I knew that, but had never tried it). Here’s my first panorama on Flickr. Flickr isn’t as good at displaying these as it could be – maybe it will improve in the future. The first problem I noticed is at the very bottom of the photo – directly below the camera. There’s some distortion there that shouldn’t be. Also, it is more difficult to zoom in and out with the mouse scroll wheel, as it usually scrolls the page instead. And it was difficult to go into full-screen mode, and once there I wasn’t always able to pan around the image.

It is possible to display panoramas interactively on WordPress, but only if I pay for a “professional” level. Since I don’t make any money from this site, I can’t really justify doing that. If you wish to see my photo(s) in a better viewer, take a look at it (them) in Roundme. This photo was taken a few days ago while on a cross-country ski outing to the top of Amabilis Mountain. 11+ miles and 2000’+ elevation gain, but the views were totally worth it! What a gorgeous day we had. Here are the rest of the photos I shot that day.

You can see all of the photos I’ve uploaded to Roundme by going to https://roundme.com/@garystebbins/tours.

What else is new?

All of the 360° panoramas I have posted in the past were shot by using my DSLR camera mounted to a tripod (or, in one case, handheld). The latest two were shot from a drone from tens of feet to several hundred feet above the ground.

I got my first done 3+ years ago, but it’s a bit too big to take on a backpack or cross-country ski trip. About a month ago I got a much smaller drone that is something I can take along with me. The drone itself weighs about 1/2 pound. I carried it in my backpack on my cross-country ski trip.

The larger drone in the photo above is a DJI Phantom 4 Pro, and the little guy is a DJI Mini 2. Both drones can automatically shoot a series of photos to be stitched into a 360° panorama photo. I then use the program PTGui to stitch the multiple images into a panorama image.

If you are curious, the panorama image is just a regular JPEG file, although it is stretched “a bit” at the top and bottom. As mentioned in my first post, it is exactly twice as wide as it is high – 360° wide and 180º high. The right and left edges join together in the panorama viewer, and the top and bottom edges are compressed to display as a single point – straight above the camera for the top edge and straight below for the bottom edge. Some additional metadata is added to the file so that the viewer program knows how to interpret the file. Here’s what the photo looks like when viewed without a panorama viewer.

There you have it – one more 360° blog post. Next (I hope) I’ll actually finish writing the 3D printer blog I promised a few months ago. Stay tuned!

Photography

Milky Way Timelapse

November 14, 2020 Gary 7 Comments

[Originally published Nov. 14, 2020, minor update Nov. 4, 2022]

Something I’ve wanted to do for years is to create a timelapse video of the night sky star motion. I made it one of my goals for this year to accomplish that. I’ve been spending a lot of time in places that have terrible views of the night sky. Mostly, too much atmospheric haze and/or too much light pollution.

In July, when Comet Neowise was visible, we found a place a short drive away that had a pretty good night sky view, and was above much of the haze. We went there to try to get a good view, and maybe a photo or two, of the Comet.

Comet Neowise, July, 2020 (15 seconds at f/4.5, ISO 800, 135mm)

We found that this location was also good viewing of the Milky Way.

Milky Way (30 seconds at f/4.0, ISO 1600, 10mm)

It might have been a good time to try for a star timelapse with the Milky Way included, but it was late and I didn’t take the time to try it.

In September we camped at Red Bridge State Wayside in Oregon. The campground is a great place, but the sky is mostly blocked by beautiful Ponderosa pine trees. It does have a pretty good view of the sky from an area near the parking lot. I took my camera and tripod with the hope of getting some decent sky images.

Toward dark I set up on the grass looking over the parking lot and took several test exposures. I was shooting with my Pentax K-3 (crop-frame) camera with a Tamron 10-24mm lens. The exposure I settled on was 6 seconds at f/3.5, ISO 6400. I set the camera to shoot 500 photos, one every 20 seconds. I turned off in-camera noise reduction, thinking I could save battery and do it in Lightroom later.

The first photo was shot at about 9:20 pm, and the last photo just past midnight. I sat in a chair near the camera for the almost three hours it took, reading a book on my Kindle. Fortunately the night was relatively warm and getting cold wasn’t too much of a problem. I did get out of the chair a few times to do some jumping jacks to stay warm.

OK, now for what I did wrong.

I judged the exposure by what the image looked like on the back of the camera. Remember, it was almost pitch black when I was doing this. The image looked great! The next morning I looked at the images. I couldn’t believe that all frames were totally black. How could I have done that? Then I realized they were underexposed so badly that I couldn’t see anything in normal light, but, viewed in a darkened room, there was some image there. Don’t judge the image exposure by what your eye sees when its almost totally dark out! Lightroom to the rescue (sort of).
Turning off in-camera noise reduction was a mistake. the Pentax K-3 does quite well at keeping the noise down, but at ISO 6400, I really needed to let the camera do what it could. Again, Lightroom noise reduction helped (but I wouldn’t say it rescued me).

Once I had 500 RAW images, I imported them all into Lightroom and did what I could to adjust exposure and reduce noise. Then exported them all as JPEG files (a painfully slow process on my ancient laptop computer). Next I fired up Adobe After Effects, brought in all of the JPEG images, and created a 1080p video at 30 frames per second. 500 frames at 30 frames per second results in a video only 16-2/3 seconds long!

The resulting video has lots of noise and color changes due to the extreme exposure adjustments I made. But I think it’s acceptable for my first attempt. Next year (or maybe this winter) I’ll do this again and improve my results.

Here is my video for you to see:

Milky Way Timelapse

360° Panoramas, Photography

360° Panoramas!

February 4, 2020 Gary 5 Comments

[Originally published February 4, 2020. Minor updates November 5, 2022.]

I’ve been playing with 360° photography for over a year. I find this to be an enjoyable variation to my regular photography.

The simplified explanation of the process is to shoot enough images to capture all directions, then stitch these images together into a special format. I sometimes use a drone to capture the images, and sometimes a camera on a tripod. The result is a spherical image, viewed as though you are at the center of the sphere and can look in all directions.

On my tripod, I use a panorama attachment, shown here, that allows the camera to pivot horizontally and vertically around the optical center of the lens so that the resulting photos align properly.

This panorama attachment has a pivoting base with detents that help position the camera at the right intervals. Using the 10-22mm lens shown above, I take eight shots in a horizontal circle to have enough overlap between shots to stitch them together properly.

When I create a panorama from a drone, I am currently using a Phantom 4 Pro, which has an automated panorama mode where it takes all of the images with one press of the “shutter.”

When the panorama is assembled from the individual images, it can be viewed with a special viewer on my computer. I publish some of my images on a website, Round.me, that specializes in displaying 360° panorama images. Unfortunately, I can’t display the images as panoramas on this website.

I am going to use an image that I shot at Gates Pass outside Tucson, AZ, this past November as an example . There is a small knoll just off the road that I climbed up to take the photos from. I set my tripod on the highest rocks on the top and took 37 images. The images were taken on manual exposure, all with the same exposure. Because there is a wide range of lighting, from shadows to full sunlight to shooting directly into the sun, I shot the images in RAW to best capture the shadows and highlights. I could also shoot bracketed exposures to capture the full tonal value, but I have found that shooting RAW in this situation yields images that I can work with to get the results I want, and it is a bit simpler than bracketing the exposures and post-processing those (although I have also done that).

Back home I import all of the images into Adobe Lightroom. In this instance, I started by doing an “Auto” process on all of the RAW images, which lightens the shadows and tones down the brightest highlights (like the sun!), then change a few other parameters (primarily Clarity, Vibrance, and Saturation) to make the image a bit more to my liking. I might also do some additional brightness adjustments if I feel that is necessary. I then export all of the images as JPEG files.

I use a program called PTGui (https://www.ptgui.com/) to create the panorama image. It is a very capable program, and can process HDR or RAW files directly, but I feel I have the control I want in a way that makes sense to me by doing the initial processing in Lightroom. Once I have the JPEG files, I import them all into PTGui. It will automatically (and magically!) align the images. Once they are aligned, if there are any problems, I can “assist” PTGui to find matching points in adjacent images. I usually only need to do this when some of the images include almost all sky or water.

It the panorama is shot from the drone, I can’t shoot straight up as the camera is mounted below the drone, and the drone blocks the camera’s view. That leaves a hole in the sky above. In this instance, I use a special mode of PTGui to export an image of the “top” of the panorama. Then I use Photoshop to fill in the hole with “sky color” similar to what is around it, and then “reassemble” the panorama with PTGui.

When using a tripod, I can shoot straight up, but the tripod is in the way when I shoot down. So when I am finished shooting all of the images, I pick the tripod up and take a shot of the ground where it was. Many of the images from the tripod pointing downward contain parts of the tripod, such as the camera platform or the tripod legs. I can select these images and indicate to PTGui which parts of particular images should not be used. If I don’t to this, some of the tripod will show up in the resultant panorama.

Once I’ve done all of the point matching and/or masking, if needed, PTGui creates the panorama photo, which is a JPEG file in a format that panorama programs can interpret. If viewed with any “normal” photo program, the image looks quite distorted as shown below. Even though I took the tripod out of the panorama, you can still see its shadow. Here is the Gates Pass JPEG image. Click on the image to view it in Roundme. Once the image opens up, click and drag with your mouse to spin the image around, or zoom in and out with your scroll wheel.

You can also view this on a tablet or iPad. With the right browser, you will be able to look in different directions just by turning the tablet.

To see all of the panoramas I have published, check out my Panorama Page at roundme.com/@garystebbins. When on that page, click the “TOURS” button to see the panoramas I have published. Some of the images here have been shot with my camera on a tripod, while others have been shot from a drone. Keep watching this site, as I will be adding new panoramas from time to time. 🙂