Improvements needed for my technique

[Bob Hanson]

I just completed my first freelance project for a local church and am not 100% happy with my photos. Here is my tour:

http://bhimagery.com/photos/church360/

 I use a Sony a7rii, Rokinon 12 mm fisheye, nodal ninja and I do my best to level the darn thing. The way I take my 360s is a series of portrait pics. I angle my camera pointed 30 degrees up and take one picture and rotate my camera 60 degrees until 360 degrees is achieved, then another row of pictures with the camera angled down 30 degrees. I then run it through Hugin. If you look closely to every pic, you will see seams. Any suggestions on a better technique is appreciated. The 12 mm has a FOV of 180 degrees, however it doesn't completely capture the zenith and nadir, hence the need to angle my camera 30 degrees twice. I've seen people leave the camera at zero (horizontal), take one row of pics, the a couple straight up in the air and a couple on the ground, however I can never seem to do that correctly. Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks,

Bob

[Sean Greenslade]

I'll start by saying that these are very good panos. I don't see very
many obvious stitching artifacts, and the ones I do see are only
apparent when zooming in. So good job so far, you're definitely 95%
there.

First off, I wouldn't spend too much time trying to ensure everything is
perfectly level / plumb in the camera & tripod. That's stuff that can
easily be corrected in the stitch. Instead, spend that time making sure
your camera & bracket are tuned to the no-parallax point. The best
resouce I know of for explaining this is:

http://www.johnhpanos.com/epcalib.htm

Though it seems to be offline at the moment. Hopefully it's just a
temporary server problem.

Generally speaking, to correct seam errors as small as the ones I see in
your panos, you'll need to do some manual tweaking of the control
points. Sometimes I'll also use exclude regions to crop out problematic
regions from particular photos. For example, there's a few small
glitches on the street curb in your first pano. If you crop out the curb
in one of the photos, you can force the seam to happen in the grass,
where it's much less likely to be noticable. I talk about this in my
sadly-incomplete stitching tutorial here:

http://seangreenslade.com/projects/pano/3-stitching.html

Specifically check out the "Hiding the Seams" section for an example of
what I mentioned above.

Your zenith and nadir points actually look really good. Whatever you're
doing seems to be working. Don't spend too much time worrying about
those, because people will rarely spend any time staring at them.

If you'd like to share one of your photo sets + .pto file (on dropbox or
something like that), I'd be happy to take a closer look and see if
there's anything else I can recommend.

--Sean

[panostar]

On Sunday, October 29, 2017 at 9:40:37 PM UTC, Sean Greenslade wrote:

... The best resouce I know of for explaining this is:

http://www.johnhpanos.com/epcalib.htm

Though it seems to be offline at the moment. Hopefully it's just a
temporary server problem.

Thanks, Sean.  I only became aware of the bad state of my web site yesterday. Alas, I am forced to move it to a new hosting service.  This should be completed in 5 days so hopefully the site should be accessible by the weekend.

I've also been in touch with Bob and established that the lower rail setting of his NN panorama head needs a fairly big adjustment.

John