# Grand Canyon panoramas



## nonac (Dec 29, 2014)

I will be shooting some single row, and possibly multiple row panoramas in a couple of months during a 3 day visit to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I am looking ahead as to what lenses I might use for this. Has anyone used the 100mm f/2.8L macro or the 135mm f/2L for stitched panoramas, and if so how well did they work for that? Thanks.


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## tolusina (Dec 29, 2014)

I've not stitched with anything but a 40mm pancake but I'm guessing it's possibly the easiest to stitch with. Again I'm guessing, but I'd think anything else is just making it harder on yourself than it needs to be.

Check some of Sporgon's gorgeous architectural and landscape photos he's shot with the 40, he's pano stitched many.
His work is excellent examples of excellent examples.


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## Khristo (Dec 29, 2014)

Here's one I did last October. This is a pano of about 8 portrait-orientation shots done with the 70-200 f/2.8 IS II at 140mm. The point of course being to get maximum detail for a large print (love being able to see the people standing inside the Opera House). The water is a separate single wide angle exposure blended to the building detail (water doesn't stitch too well!). 

No special pano gear used. Stitching was done with PS and worked a treat after trialing a few different settings, with a great job on the joins. The file got up to about 800mb (22K by 6K pixels) at one point and I had to downsize a bit then as it was starting to crash my PC at that size. (And of course downsized further here for posting.)

I did a previous attempt a while ago using the 100L, so I guess that proves it's not too hard to stitch multiple shots at those sorts of focal lengths (can't be too hard if I can do it!). Having said that, I imagine the Sydney skyline (nice and level) might be easier to deal with than the Grand Canyon will be. 

Good luck and Look forward to you posting your results!


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## epsiloneri (Dec 29, 2014)

dilbert said:


> It doesn't matter what lens you use.


Longer focal lengths are generally easier to stitch due to reduced projection effects. Depending on the field of view intended to be captured, it might not be practical to have lenses of very long focal lengths as the number of required individual shots for the stitch may become too many. E.g., on full frame a 100mm lens needs 2*pi/(0.7*36/100) = 25 shots for full 360 degree panorama in landscape mode (with 30% overlap), 38 in portrait mode. If you also want more vertical coverage, the number of shots grow accordingly.


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## bjd (Dec 29, 2014)

Hi, it may not be the GC, but here is one I did using my trusty EF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS II USM. In all 11 shots in Portrait mode. As the Lens was set at 70mm, I guess it would have worked at 100mm too. Stitched with Panaorama Studio, which works very well, and is (was) pretty inexpensive.
I have a pretty large version on the wall at work and the detail is very good. 
Final size was 20863x4770 pixels, around 800MB.
Cheers Brian


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## Sporgon (Dec 29, 2014)

nonac said:


> I will be shooting some single row, and possibly multiple row panoramas in a couple of months during a 3 day visit to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I am looking ahead as to what lenses I might use for this. Has anyone used the 100mm f/2.8L macro or the 135mm f/2L for stitched panoramas, and if so how well did they work for that? Thanks.



The 135L is great for panoramics, as long as the subject isn't too close, which it is unlikely to be when using this lens; certainly not the Grand Canyon. I'm attaching two 'double stacked' panoramics both shot on the 135L. Of all my panoramics these have a quality and brightness to them that I imagine I can see, others probably can't unless it is pointed out. As usual we are splitting hairs, but the use of longer focal lengths allow more volume of light to make the picture. This is one of the main advantages of a larger format system, the focal lengths used are longer, and they pass more volume of light for a given aperture. ( Not to be confused with light density - aka exposure). It is also one of the issues with cramming more pixels into a given format size. Pixels are only one part of the resolution; you must have light as well. Once you have enough pixels to define a subject accurately ( along with all the others factors needed to do this), then adding more pixels is very much a law of diminishing returns, so I have no desire to own a 50 mp FF sensor sized camera. Panoramic stitches on the other hand are larger format. The original picture of Beverley Minster for example was about 175 mp with a format size of about 147mm x 73, so not far off a large 5x4 format film camera. 

Same thing goes for the 100L. Very low distortion = good, far out nodal point = bad. If you are shooting subjects closer to you, then the less distortion and the shorter the nodal point of the lens the better. You can easily see this for yourself if you have a short prime and a standard zoom. With say a 40 pancake, which has both very low distortion and a short nodal point, stand in the corner of a room and then, keeping the camera level, sweep around the room looking through the viewfinder, watching the wall joint to the ceiling. Now put on a standard zoom and set it to 40mm. Most standard zooms at 40 have very low distortion. Do the same thing and watch how the edges of the frame twist and bend as you sweep round. This is parallax, and your stitching software will have to try and deal with this. 

As I said at the beginning, not an issue with the 135L as the subject will be well away from you.


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## bjd (Dec 29, 2014)

Sporgon said:


> nonac said:
> 
> 
> > I will be shooting some single row, and possibly multiple row panoramas in a couple of months during a 3 day visit to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I am looking ahead as to what lenses I might use for this. Has anyone used the 100mm f/2.8L macro or the 135mm f/2L for stitched panoramas, and if so how well did they work for that? Thanks.
> ...


Fabulous shots.


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## Click (Dec 29, 2014)

Beautiful shots Sporgon. I especially like the second picture.


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## surapon (Dec 29, 2014)

nonac said:


> I will be shooting some single row, and possibly multiple row panoramas in a couple of months during a 3 day visit to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I am looking ahead as to what lenses I might use for this. Has anyone used the 100mm f/2.8L macro or the 135mm f/2L for stitched panoramas, and if so how well did they work for that? Thanks.



Dear friend Mr. nonac.
In 2013, We went to South Rim at Grand Canyon( By Tour Bus Group) and spend 45 Minutes to take the Photos With Canon 5D MK II , Canon 1DS and Canon TS-E 24 mm F/ 3.5 L MK II, EF 17-40 mm L, and EF 24-70 MM F/ 2.8 L.
Most of the Photos below = TS-E 24 mm, with Horizontal Shift, shoot 3 Photos and use Photoshop 5.5 to create panoramic pictures.
Enjoy.
Surapon

PS. ore Photos at the attached Link

share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0AZM2bNq1cuWjS_g


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## surapon (Dec 29, 2014)

Most of the Photos below = TS-E 24 mm, with Horizontal Shift, shoot 3 Photos and use Photoshop 5.5 to create panoramic pictures.


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## Rams_eos (Dec 29, 2014)

I have not used the 100mm macro but I should. Being so sharp can only be beneficial for landscape. Good idea.

I used the 40mm pancake for Golden gate and was pleased with result.
I tend to use close to 50% overlap to make it easier afterwards.
Choose exposure at the center of final image. And turn camera close to lens axis.
I use Microsoft ICE (free) and I am fully happy with result.


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## nonac (Dec 30, 2014)

Thanks for the comments. Some great shots. Sharp on did you have any specific spots you shot from that were favorites? Also, what time of year were you there and did you have to battle crowds of people to get your shots? I'm really looking forward to this trip and I hope the weather cooperates. I've never seen the Canyon from the rim, but I've seen every mile of it from the bottom as I did an 8 day whitewater trip on the river about 10 years ago. I'll be there the first week of March and it will definitely be cold in the mornings and nights. I just hope there are no major snow storms moving through.


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## gjones5252 (Dec 30, 2014)

for living right below the canyon i think i should have more pictures of it


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## Rocky (Dec 30, 2014)

I like Surapon's method. For me, the Pano is used to show as much area as possible. As a pixel peeper, there are always very minor imperfection due to stitching. the more stitching, the more imperfection. In oder to hide them, you will have to down size the final picture. Therfore, what is the point of having a few hundred mega pixel and down size it to be a few mega pixels. Just imagine that a 24mm lense will cover the area of 16 picture made with a 100 mm lens. Therefore, if you are using 100mm lense to do stitching you will need 48 pictures to get what Surapon got with 3 shots with 24mm lens
I would use the lens of the shortest focal length with the minimum distortion for stitching.


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## Sporgon (Dec 30, 2014)

Click said:


> Beautiful shots Sporgon. I especially like the second picture.



Thanks bjd & click. 

I wanted to get Whitby Abbey at sunrise, so had to set off at three thirty in the morning in order to arrive at that time. There was a thin bank of cloud on the horizon and I had to wait for the rising sun to clear this, so the picture was taken with the sun higher than I had wanted, and I was a bit disappointed with it at first. However as time goes by and I see it with the others I think it stands up well. Glad you like it.


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## Famateur (Dec 30, 2014)

dilbert said:


> ...plus you have to keep track of all the parts of the frame that you've captured in your head.


An easy way to get around this, if your camera has the capability (and you're using a tripod), is to use Live View with the "Rule of Thirds" grid overlaid. Then you just rotate the camera so the vertical line on the left covers what was covered by the vertical line on the right in the previous shot. This gives an easy ~1/3 overlap for each successive frame.


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## Famateur (Dec 30, 2014)

Sporgon said:


> Click said:
> 
> 
> > Beautiful shots Sporgon. I especially like the second picture.
> ...



Thanks for posting -- _love _the Whitby Abbey shot. The light, and color in the sky, plus a beautiful setting and reflection to boot -- beautiful.


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## epsiloneri (Dec 30, 2014)

dilbert said:


> epsiloneri said:
> 
> 
> > Longer focal lengths are generally easier to stitch due to reduced projection effects.
> ...


Why do you think it's silly? Have you compared stitching photos from ultra-wide lenses to photos from long tele-photo lenses? Rectilinear lenses approximate the field of view by gnomonic projection on a flat surface, thereby converting a solid angle into a flat area. It is the same problem experienced when producing flat maps of the spheroidal Earth - the smaller the area covered, the smaller the distortions in the projection. That's why flat city maps look OK, while maps of the whole globe tend to look distorted.

Now, for a photo using a rectilinear lens, this distortion is a 1/cos(angle) function of the angle to the direction you are pointing the camera. With a long focal length, the difference between the centre and the edge will be much smaller than for a wide angle lens, so the image scale will be more uniform and the distortion smaller. That means that to stitch photos from wider-angle lenses, more geometric correction has to be applied in order to get adjacent images to match seamlessly. More required post-processing correction = more difficult to match well and loss of IQ.


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## Famateur (Dec 30, 2014)

epsiloneri said:


> dilbert said:
> 
> 
> > epsiloneri said:
> ...


This fits my understanding as well. My rule of thumb is to apply lens corrections before stitching. It helps with vignetting, too.

My panos tends to turn out a bit better when I use longer focal lengths. I also like the effect of compression when doing panos with long focal lengths, at least for mountains. If I was doing a pano of a dry lake bed, the exaggerated foreground from a wide angle might be what I'm after...



dilbert said:


> Whilst that comment is just plain silly



Comments like this don't do much for me in the discussion. It's useless criticism that could have at least been said more pleasantly in the form of, "I disagree with this." Following it with some explanation is helpful to members, like me, who enjoy opportunities to learn new things.

Of course, you can do whatever you want on a forum, but if it matters to you that your posts are meaningful and garner respect from other members, I'd love to hear good-natured rebuttals with explanations to back them up instead of blunt put-downs.


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## Sporgon (Dec 31, 2014)

Famateur said:


> Sporgon said:
> 
> 
> > Click said:
> ...



Thanks for that Famateur, you've made my new year evening !

As I said in the quote above I made a big effort to get that shot, but the lighting ended up not as I had imagined it was going to be. However the more I see it, especially among other pictures, the more I like it.

Happy New Year !


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## Nelu (Dec 31, 2014)

Does this count as a panorama? 

I have another one but for some reason I think the 2x3 format works better than panorama for the canyon photo...


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