Fine Art (landscape) prints

[Geoff Wittig]

Ouch! Down in flames!
I've used my incorrect nodal point method for a while with apparent  success, but perhaps its inaccuracy is hidden by my rather permissive stitching method. My original source was elsewhere on the web, exactly where I have since forgotten, so I'll take the bullet alone. I still have a hard time accepting the notion that the nodal point doesn't change at all with shifting focal length of a zoom lens.

[Jonathan Wienke]

Ouch! Down in flames!
I've used my incorrect nodal point method for a while with apparent  success, but perhaps its inaccuracy is hidden by my rather permissive stitching method.

It is entirely possible that your method works for your particular lens; you never said what it was. It just doesn't work for all lenses in general.

[U_Grsl]

Landscape photography is somewhat an art
You take pictures...
Day after days
Year after years
Some of them may be ... displayable (?)
you may even discover a few of them cold be sold, so far so good,
but to think starting a business from scratch as landscape photographer is naive or/and preposterous.
Thus, medium or large format ?
I guess it's simply irrelevant
Sorry

UG

[Geoff Wittig]

I'd put it this way. I've been selling the occasional print for about 6 years, initially from scanned 35 mm slides. Over time I've migrated upstream and now use an Eos-1Ds mk II. This year I'm stitching together up to 10 frames of 16.6 megapixel capture and making prints up to 8 feet wide with excellent detail. People look at my best 35 mm images and say, "that's nice". When they stand in front of a 2' x 8' panoramic they are stunned.
You can certainly do excellent work in 35 mm. But larger effective formats provide the kind of micro-detail and smooth tonality in big enlargements that really draw viewers in. That's why the past masters mostly used large format.
It's also fair to say that a successful fine-art nature photography business is a lot more about marketing and business sense than about photography. You may find a course in marketing and time spent learning your local art market more valuable than photographic stuff.

[Tim Gray]

Panos and stitching are very meaty topics:

Here is a link to some basic reference material: panos

You don't move the camera, but pivot on a tripod.  One issue is that if there is near foreground subject matter that the parallax can be significant - you can buy special pano heads that not only allow for a rotation, but ensure that the rotation is around the nodal point (entrance or exit pupil - I forget) to minimize the parallax problem, also not much of a problem for distant material.  They can also help doing multiple rows of panos.

Photoshop has a rudimentary stitching program, but there a lot out there - I use panorama tools.

You can also us a lens with shift capability to do what's basically a 2 frame pano.

If you're doing stitching with lots of high res frames you'll need as much horsepower as possible.

Here's the link to a pano of Bryce made from just under 200 6 mpx images and took several days to crunch.

[TimeZone]

Geoff, thanks for the reply.

I'm have a little trouble finding my nodal point.    Didn't even know I had one.   .

I thought with the tripod it would be easy to just rotate and take the shots, but this nodal point thing does add a little more to it.  I think I basically understand what it is, but have found some different web pages describing how to find it and am having trouble following.  The lenses I have with me for my film Canon (EOS 10S) are a Tamron, and a Sigma and I'm not noticing the circle and slash symbol on any of these.  I have some Canon lenses also, but not with me currently, that I will have to check to see if they have this.

It looks like I will probably need to upgrade my tripod with a panoramic head or build something custom (my likely choice) in order to shoot the images properly.

I have a Gitzo G220 tripod that I have had for years that is pretty descent.  It has a G1270 Rationnelle Low Profile Head on it.  I don't think this head will allow me to shoot correctly though, at least not if I shoot vertically. I will need to build an adapter for that I'm sure, from what I can tell.  I guess vertical shots are generally the recommended orientation to shoot panoramics when your joining multiple images?  I can see this if it was just one row across, that the vertical would give you more resolution up and down, but if your doing multiple rows I don't think it would matter...

I am really leaning toward getting an Epson 4800 printer.  The 7800 at 24" and 9800 at 44" would be great, but they're that much more money and so huge.  The 4800 is not exactly small itself.  I will have enough trouble trying to find a place for it.  The 7800 would be a much nicer size for panoramics, but the 4800's 17" will still do me pretty good.  Plus, I might be wrong, but is sounds like it will be easier to work with for putting smaller size sheets through it, than on the bigger printers.  I guess I could always pay for a print on a bigger machine if I really wanted to.

I've only got 512mb right now, so I definetly need to stick another 1 GB or 2GB in if I'm going to work with these huge files.

[Tim Gray]

Here a link to determining the nodal point.

[TimeZone]

The film plane is absolutely NOT the same as the entrance pupil (aka "nodal point") of the lens, which is important when shooting stitched panos. To locate the entrance pupil, go to manual or AV mode, set the aperture to f/22, and press the DOF preview button. The entrance pupil will correspond to the location of the aperture diaphragm, which will become visible when looking into the front of the lens with the DOF preview button pressed. It will be between the front element and the lens mount somewhere. With zoom lenses, it will vary depending on the zoom adjustment.

Jonathan, thanks for the clear answer on this.  Out of all the web pages I've read, your statement is the only one that has clearly stated just what the nodal point is and how to find it.

The aperture diaphragm is something I can understand as opposed to entrance and exit pupils that was rather confusing, as I didn't know what part of the lens they were talking about.

I can clearly see this on my Tamron 28 - 200 zoom when I was checking it, but still find it really tough to judge where it is in the lens for sure.  All the lens elements really give a lot of optical illusions about where things are in the lens.

At least I know what to look for now, so this gives me a good starting point.  I will need to build something for my tripod though to better adjust my camera.

With some work I think that for the horizontal rotation to keep it centered on the nodal point shouldn't be too tough.

I'm really having trouble thinking of a way to keep the nodal point constant though if I wanted to shoot multiple rows where the camera was also tilted / rotated up and down.  It seems almost impossible to get that one exactly right.  It would require a pivot point right in the center of your lens.  I guess a pivot point directly below the nodal point of the lens would be as good as you can do, but that has me stumped.

Are there any good plans / products (hopefully cheap) that would maintain the nodal point for both horizontal and vertical adjustments, while shooting one multi-shot scene?

[Lin Evans]

I'm have a little trouble finding my nodal point.    Didn't even know I had one.   .

As you have seen, there are many suggestions about how to find the entrance pupil (correct designation for what is commonly referred to incorrectly as "nodal point").

The problem is that many cameras are not marked and it's not always possible to actually determine by measuring and looking, but there is a very simple way to do it which is accurate enough for any pano.

Find a vertical object on the far horizon and place a vertical object (monopod with someone holding it works well, stick in the ground, etc.) close to your lens (about 2 feet in front of your lens or where you can see it and the vertical object on the horizon.)  Line up the camera so that you can see both the vertical object on the horizon and vertical object close to the lens. Rotate the camera on the tripod while observing the two objects. If they stay in alignment you have the entrance pupil and rotation point aligned. If they move in respect to one another as you rotate the lens, then slide the camera forward and try again. If the relative movement is greater you went the wrong way so slide the camera past the original point and continue doing so until you find a point where the two objects stay aligned. That's the correct point for the present focal length. If you are using a zoom lens, then you will need to "correct" the point when and if you zoom.

This sound much more complicated than it really is. You can do this in a few seconds with a little practice.

Lin

[Hermie]

See also the following articles on outbackphoto:

Workflow Technique #071
"Stitching with Realviz Stitcher 4.x (PC & Mac)"
http://www.outbackphoto.com/workflow/wf_71/essay.html

Workflow Technique #058
"Avoiding Parallax while Stitching with Shift Lenses"
http://www.outbackphoto.com/workflow/wf_58/essay.html

Workflow Techniques #048
"High Resolution Stitching: Sinar and Canon 1Ds"
http://www.outbackphoto.com/workflow/wf_48/essay.html

Herman