Hello World! My First Aerial Panorama.

This was my first panorama, and it was a real "selfie “experiment.

People are doing lots of ground panoramas with tripods, Companies in this marketplace are already selling hardware (nodal mounts) and software (e.g. Panotools) to work with the images – But we don’t know if these tools work for other situations - Aerial Panoramas.

In a time before drones, I am following Philippe Urbain, fly a kite, I already use a kite for rectilinear aerial photography but to make aerial panoramas

1.   No-one is doing this so there is no hardware to balance
      the camera keep it steady, and remotely trigger the shutter,

2.   Will the stitching tools work successfully, with no flaws?

This image is about testing #2 above. This is the test shoot without using the kite. To test the downstream processing of a panorama made from 2 hemispheres stitched around the horizon - hiding the stitch between the land and the sky!

Here is the result, with the family looking and shooting, in fact wait a minute the Panoramic Camera is in shot too! Next time I will use a kite…

After the event the software tools (e.g. PTGUI) became more powerful with time and work for tripods, kites, drones. But the mount for a kite panorama is still a hand-made / balanced solution the marketplace doesn’t address…

Europe / UK-Scotland

Lat: 55° 55' 32.669" N
Long: 4° 9' 27.729" W

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Nikon 4300 with FC-E8 full fisheye lens.

Unlike the normal workflow, this shot deliberately uses 2 hemispheres stitched around the horizon. Normally fisheye lenses don't do this well because of distortion and chromatic aberration at the edge of the lens. The FC08 and FC09 are advertised with a usable 183-degree FoV. After these tests it became clear that the actual FoV was 189degrees, the last 6degrees has an increasingly bad blue offset - this is exactly what we want - the sky is blue! For once everything is in our favour. Next... fly the kite!