What I want to do
Continue to explore making panoramas with the Chris Fastie and Don Blair Arduino controlled Saturn V and SkyShield beta with pan and tilt and CHDK for aerial panoramas. I've reported my subsequent and initial experience and tried some of this myself with a different pan-only rig.
My attempt and results
Flew Delta 9' Levitation with Canon A1200 in autoexposure mode, rather than A495 used for prior attempts. Camera tray hole configuration led me to use 1/2" long 1/4 by 20 wingnut to get adequate purchase on camera tripod threads. I also added a safety loop to secure the camera to the rig.Otherwise configuration as before.
Images from PS's Photomerge still look saddle-like:
Questions and next steps
Fly and continue to evaluate. Consider sketch edits like Chris has made. Try other cameras.
Why I'm interested
As indicated before, integration of simple computing capability into our projects can provide flexibility and versatility and I'd like to learn more about using these small boards. People have expressed interest in making aerial panoramas. Again, Chris and Don fielded this in a few weeks. Kudos to them, yet again!
4 Comments
Pat, Photomerge is doing a good job stitching your photos. It is not including many photos with sky, which might be because those photos do not overlap enough with each other. If you used the default mode (Mode 0) in version 004 or 005 of the sketch, the rig will take eight photos per rotation which might not be enough for the 28mm lens of the A1200. Mode 2 should work better (9 photos/rotation), and Mode 6 will also work (10 photos/rotation if you are using version 005 of the sketch). It's easy to edit the sketch so that any mode is the default.
Photomerge has a spherical mode, so it should not have a problem with half spherical panoramas. But it does not have a method of displaying spherical panoramas similar to the viewer at Photosynth. So the flattened spherical panorama is always going to look distorted. I will try to stitch one of my sets in Photomerge and see how it works.
Thanks for the testing. Chris
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Thanks Chris. We're away to Denver to celebrate my brother's birthday. I'll try to check with the SX260HS (supposedly 4.5mm (W) - 90.0 mm (T) (35mm film equivalent: 25-500mm), then try the other modes, either by toggling through or editing the sketch to making one with more rotations the default. Have you had others report trouble viewing your Photosynths in Firefox? Is there another place I can look to see your results?
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PS: I see the Photosynth works in Chrome.
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Pat, I just did a fresh install of Firefox on Windows 7. When I clicked the embedded Photosynth, it wanted me to "activate" Silverlight. I clicked OK and it took a few seconds and then loaded and displayed the panorama properly. The embeds also display correctly in Internet Explorer. They do not display properly in Chrome in Windows, but they do display. Chris
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