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Hi everyone,
I just recently bought the panogear package and it seems I have some problems with the sky in gigapixel images.
Having the panoramic head record an xml file for each shooting, to place parts of the sky that have no or too little detail, to be distinguished from one another, is great, but there are still some problems for me with the sky:
- When I use autofocus on my camera (Canon EOS 5D Mark II, using a 300mm lense), automatic shooting with the Panogear works fine for me for the ground, but when it reaches the sky, the camera won't be able to find the focus and therefore won't release when triggered. That leads to missings images and the xml import into Autopano Giga not working. But if I were to set the focus manually, I would loose focus in other regions of the image. I could of cause set the camera to release priority, so that it takes an image even if autofocus fails, but that might lead to having parts of the sky with different focal points, which could look pretty bad when there are some clouds or parts of the horizon in the image...
- When there are some clearly visible clouds in the sky and some wind, the clouds move over time. Slowly, but when shooting a very large gigapixel image, the panoramic head will move even slower. If I were to take an image that takes about four hours to shoot, I might have the clouds in completely different places for each row of images...
One idea that I came up with, was shooting the image from bottom upwards unsing autofocus and switch to manual focus on the lense once it reaches the horizon... I did not yet get around to test this idea, but it anyway would not fix the cloud movement issue and might lead to focus problems if there are any tall skyscrapers in the image, that reach above the horizon.
Another idea would be, to just shoot the sky at a shorter focal length for easy stitching and scaling it up. But that would means there would be some "fake" gigapixels... 
So, how do you guys address this issue? Do you use autofocus or manual/fixed focus for the entire image? Any other camera settings or workflows that I should know of? I'm happy for every bit of help. 
Cheers,
André
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Use manual focus to avoid the faliure to focus and shoot issue.
You just have 'live with' the moving clouds issue when shooting these high res. mosaic panos; some patterns of shooting are more appropriate than others when faced with this challenge, if it's critical then yoiu may just have to wait for the 'right' weather conditions.
Some have changed manual focus row by row.
What lesn and camera are you using?
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Hi mediavets,
thanks for your answer!
I am currently using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lense for testing now, but I might use a Canon EF 100-400mm 4.5-5.6 L IS USM later.
So what you're saying is the best way to go might be starting at the bottom and focussing one's way through to the horizon and then keeping the last distant focus for all of the sky, right?
That actually does not sound much different from what I had in mind. I will give that a try, thanks!
Cheers,
André
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Asphar wrote:
So what you're saying is the best way to go might be starting at the bottom and focussing one's way through to the horizon and then keeping the last distant focus for all of the sky, right?
That actually does not sound much different from what I had in mind. I will give that a try, thanks!
Cheers,
André
That's not quite what I intended.
I was merely reporting that as I recall someone else paused the head at the start of each row and reset the manual focus for that next row and so on.
Check out hyperfocal distances for your lenses:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutori … stance.htm
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mediavets wrote:
I was merely reporting that as I recall someone else paused the head at the start of each row and reset the manual focus for that next row and so on.
Yes! 
Besides: instead of dealing with hyperfocal-tables it´s preferable to use the live-preview (if existing) to check distances and hyperfocal settings. I have an 8" field monitor via HDMI mounted next to my 5D2 . . and i´m usually surprised about the much more precise focusing.
SEEING two points with a field of relative sharpness between them gives you a chance to adjust it to the real surrounding. Tables can´t know that!
best, Klaus
Last edited by klausesser (2011-03-22 22:25:54)
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