- A lot of times, with panoramic photography,
it's all about resolution.
And what we have here, are telephoto lenses.
Ron, why would you use a telephoto lens when shooting a 360?
- Because I want to take more, and more, and more photos.
- Because you wanna spend all day post-processing, right?
- Correct.
No, it's to get an enormous final resolution,
so you can really zoom into the fine details.
- And sometimes for interactive exploration,
this works pretty well.
You actually did the post-production
on a pretty famous gigapixel image,
the president's inauguration, right?
- [Ron] Right, I did some work on that,
when they wanted to take it to print,
because there were, naturally, quite a few stitching errors,
and where people had moved from place to place,
or famously, Aretha Franklin's hat
was on someone else's head.
So, I was asked by the photographer,
there was David Bergman,
and he got to shoot the inauguration,
and he used one of these gigapan automated systems
to capture the entire scene,
and I understand it took about twenty minutes
to do all the capture, but once he set it up,
it was all automated.
- [Voiceover] Yeah, and, that's the idea here,
is that we can actually program the camera
to do a series of moves, so a lot of times
when you're shooting panoramic photography,
you're gonna manually pan the camera,
and produce overlap.
But, this system has the ability to do it.
For example, we could adjust the horizon or field of view
to set the top of the frame here.
And hit OK, and then go down to the bottom part,
there we go.
It determined the field of view.
And, as we go through, we could then program in
the rest of the moves from left to right.
And, it will then go through
and actually do all of those moves,
panning and taking the picture.
And making sure it's stable and not shaking in-between.
Now, this can produce a ton of photos,
and it's a pretty big stitching job.
Ron, how do you approach these types of stitching?
- You get a very powerful computer.
- Brew some coffee?
- Go ahead and brew some coffee.
There's a lot of answers to that,
the time between when the Obama gigapan was done,
compared to now,
the computers have become so much more powerful that,
it's really not as big of an issue,
I didn't need to go out and get a new computer
to work on gigapans today, where, at the time I did.
So, this advantage in stitching is, simply,
the time it takes.
And then, if you have crowds involved,
you're usually dealing with,
even normal movement of people
can be a little bit difficult.
But, once you've done that a couple of times,
then the post-processing becomes a little bit more natural.
- And you likely wanna shoot these
sort of in the middle of the day, right?
Because otherwise the lighting conditions can change a lot,
'cause it takes a while to move to cover a gigapan scene.
You got a long shooting period.
- I know that the accomplished gigapan photographers,
such as Mr. Bergman that we mentioned,
tends to do a combination approach
where he sets it up ahead of time,
but still touches the button each time to rotate each,
the camera, and he can constantly maintain focus,
and do small changes in exposure as well.
- Yeah, so, you can use this as a totally automated system
where it actually connects to the camera
and triggers the shot, or, a manual solution,
where it's just doing the panning,
and then you can still make small changes,
or invoke autofocus.
Now, this type of system needs to run on a battery,
and if you are really zoomed in, say at 200 millimeters,
the battery might run out.
So in that case, you probably need to go with
an external power supply
where you plug this into a wall adapter.
But, you have another solution there Ron,
that actually relies on just human power, correct?
- Yeah, this is a brand new,
almost brand new tripod head right now from Nodal Ninja,
and it allows us to still take these very small shifts
in rotation and tilt, however it's done manually,
so while you can't walk away
and let the head do all the work itself,
you do maintain full control.
And, as well as the fact
that there are no batteries to worry about,
it's much more compact, when we break this down,
it goes into a small box,
where this one requires almost an additional suitcase -
- Backpack.
- If you're travelling, right.
So, there are really great advantages and disadvantages,
as always, with all equipment, and this one will take just
the full size lenses as well.
- As you move, it clicks into place, right?
- [Ron] As usual, Nodal Ninja does a great job of
setting this tripod head so I can control the exact amount
of rotation, and you can hear these click into place,
very important tool to have in the field,
especially when you're doing such fine adjustments.
- One of the things I like
about that sort of feeling-type system,
is that while I can look and read the degrees,
you're shooting in lower light,
it's kind of difficult to see that,
you don't have to keep pulling out a flashlight,
or you're just sort of doing it by guessing,
this really lets you know, yeah,
you've hit that rotation, right?
- Gives you the confidence to be sure you're catching
what you need, and you can focus on other things,
that, such as other settings of the camera,
if that's what you're interested in.
- If you wanna learn more about gigapixel type photography,
we do have a little bit of coverage,
and are getting started with panoramas course, here,
available in the online library,
so you could check that out to learn more
about some of the essential settings
of using this equipment, and then extrapolate that,
and take it into your 360 degree photography.