A Family of Panotwins (part 1)

Theme

We are a big family of Panotwins ;-)
Be sure to take a look at the second panorama of Panotwin Markus.
See the timelapse video of the shooting!

Making Of

The shooting was done with a custom-made lens bracket (see fig. 1) mounted on top of a tripod. A similar setup was placed on the table and used for the second panorama. The custom lens bracket allowed us to turn around the no-parallax point of the lens.

As the lenses used were fisheye lenses, four pictures easily covered 360°. To be sure we took three exposures in each direction. The exposures were 2 f-stops apart. The best exposed set was chosen before stitching.

For each pair of twins we took a bracketed set of three images from each tripod. As the lighting changed over the shooting period (approx. one hour) I chose the best matching shot for blending.

I first stitched the sphere without the Panotwins. The resulting equirectangular image was used as an anchor for the seven additional shots of the Panotwins. For each pair of Panotwins I generated a separate layer, which was blended manually in Photoshop.

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Europe / Germany

Lat: 50° 6' 41.2" N
Long: 8° 40' 50.21" E

Elevation: 100

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: Unknown / Undeclared.

• Camera: Sony Alpha 900

• Lens: Sigma 10mm f/2.8 fisheye (lenshood shaved)

• Mounting: Custom-made lens bracket (see fig. 1) mounted on top of a tripod

• Software: Panotools, PTGui Pro, Smartblend, Photoshop CS5, Pano2VR

• 4 pictures @ 90° / ISO 400 for the "base" panorama

• 7 pictures / ISO 400 each pointed at a pair of Panotwins