HI Lon -
There's obviously a lot more to doing these than I've contemplated - and it looks like I did just about everything wrong this time...
In regards to your questions -
1) What focal length? I've heard it said that going below 50mm is not advisable in 35mm because of distortion at the edges.
I was shooting between 20 and 24 with the FA 20-35 zoom. There was lots of distortion of near objects, not much distortion of distant objects. One of the seams fell into just empty water, so the distortion there is not apparent at all. Another fell on the rocks and the distortion was very apparent there - the same rock looked very different in the different frames. There I just picked which image to use and dealt with it when blending the two exposures.
2) Did you shoot vertically or horizontally? Here again, advise I've read says to shoot vertically (counterintuitive at first, til you think about it)
That does make sense now that I think about it - but I shot horizontally.
3) How much overlap from frame to frame? A third? A quarter?
I scanned the right side of the finder till I found a distinctive object, then just unlocked the base of the ball head and moved it till it was on the left side of the frame. The overlap was not much - maybe 10 - 20%.
4) Did you worry about the "true center" of the lens?
No, not at all. Never even thought about it.
BTW - what is the 'true center?' of a lens? =:-0
5) Did you use a leveling tripod head? How fussy were you about leveling?
I _was_ fussy about leveling - I put a level into the camera hotshoe and worked my way up from the small circular level on the tripod, to the two horizontal levels the tripod head, to the level on the camera itself. I also checked that as I rotated the camera, the horizon did not shift up or down in the frame. Probably because of lens distortions, I had to shoot with the film plane straight up and down - even with the tripod fairly close to the water (I was 10 to 15 feet out in the river) the horizon tended to be more vertically centered than I wanted.
6) Did you use only tools available in Photoshop as shipped to do your stitching?
Photoshop was it - I created a large blank image big enough to hold all three exposures, and then just added each one as a layer on top of the one before, making the new layer temporarily transparent to be able to line it up. Then I dropped the new layer onto the old and use the eraser tool at varying levels of transparency to blend the two. After that I cleaned up with the clone stamp and used the dodge and burn tools to correct for obvious differences in how the water reflected back light in the different frames.
the contest requires that all photos be mounted onto black foam core with no borders. I managed to do that yesterday without ruining the print - which required a lot of kludging since this thing is much longer than my little mat cutter...
- MCC
----- Mark Cassino Kalamazoo, MI -----
Photography:
http://www.markcassino.com
