Wide angle lens?

[george_b]

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I think that for landscapes stitching may even be preferred. Normal lenses have less distortion than wide angles, and the increase in resolution means larger prints are possible.

 

The question is what to stitch with. The only program I have had consistently good results with, often with almost no effort, is Autopano Pro.

Try CS3, best stitcher I have found so far. Just need to ensure your originals for use are all at the same level say from a tripod with a swivel head.

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[t024484]

Different perspective, different feel, different philosophy, different zen. It's not the same.

 

Here is my experience for what it is worth.

I tried to make a stitched landscape picture with my 28mm cron and started with 3 pictures , overlapping each by 50%, all made with the M8 on a tripod.

The viewing angle of the 28mm is about 84 degrees, and I wanted a picture with roughly 150 degrees viewing angle.

Result with CS2 was bad, because of many distortions.

Then I went to a larger overlap, result still not O.K. and so on.

At last I had a serie of 15 pictures, all shiffted by 5 degrees.

Photoshop Merge was very well able to connect all pictures with no help, but the result is still unacceptable.

For instance trees are not in one piece but composed of vertical parts jumping from left to right.

It was a nice experiment, but now I bought a 15mm Voigtlander.

 

I learned that you will have to pivot the Camera around a certain point to avoid parralax. Obviously, the connection point for the tripod on the M8 is not under the centre of the lens, and is not in the plane of the little round metal dot in the flash shoe ( ref Marknorton).

Maybe someone like John Milich can produce a camera bottom with the tripod connection exactly here.

[t024484]

The viewing angle of the 28mm is about 84 degrees, and I wanted a picture with roughly 150 degrees viewing angle.

This is wrong of course, the viewing angle of the 28mm is 52 degrees, and I wanted roughly twice this angle.

[Speenth]

Why buy a wide angle lens when you can very easily stitch together 2 50mm photos?

 

I'm not sure why I'm answering this. I think you're having a laugh. However, here goes: A wide angle lens is not selected solely to 'fit more into the frame'! If that's the only requirement it may be sensible merely to stitch images (or for simplicity's sake, use a D-Lux 3 set to 16x4).

 

A wide angle lens is a creative tool. It changes the perception of depth and modifies both the horizontal and the vertical perspective. A wide angle gives remarkable depth of field, offering the viewer lots of things to see up close and far away. Three dimensional relationships are changed in an interesting way. The wide angle image draws the viewer in. In other words, it packs interest into the frame in a way that a stitched panorama might struggle to emulate. That said, as the examples here show, stitched panoramas can be just as interesting as any produced using a wide angle lens. They're different, that's all - that's the beauty of photography. We have a lot of paintbrushes to play with.

 

Thinking about this, I conclude that a wide angle lens excels at revealing depth and a panorama majors on width.