BIG Panoramas made easy – the GigaPan way

Every now and again a bit of kit comes into our hands and we say. “Wow, this is a bit special!”. Enter the GigaPan Epic Pro. It comes to us courtesy of the Australian magazine Better Digital Camera, for it was they who opened our eyes to the possibilities. We missed a trick to be honest, for we had seen GigaPans before but assumed that the kit would cost thousands. In fact it is a very gulpable £800 or so, the sort of money you might make back with your first commissioned panorama for the right client!

Everything about the GigaPan is epic in proportions: big files, massive scratch files in Photoshop and a bewildering amount of detail with which to wow the viewer. Despite this, it is trivially simple to use; we managed to get it going with out looking at a manual of any description and followed the instructions on the LCD screen. The basis of making a GigaPan is simple: instead of a single, wide-angle shout, you make a mosaic of telephoto shots and stitch the blighters together – hundreds or even thousands of them. Finished pans may be uploaded to the GigaPan website at www.gigapan.org where you can zoom about to your heart’s content and also see what others in the community have been up to.

We got our bearings using a 105mm lens but soon expanded our ambitions and set off for the banks of the River Mersey, for a view of the famous Liverpool Waterfront. We shot at a distance of 1,500 yards to the nearest point, 3,500 yards to the edges of the view. For reference, the Liverpool Cathedral was 2,700 yards away. We chose a 300mm f4 Nikkor Apo mounted on a Manfrotto MPRO 535. At this shooting distance rocksolid mounting is vital and mirror lock-up almost essential; we did not use lock-up and paid the price, a couple of the shots seemed a little wobbly. Also, at this distance, atmospheric haze is an issue and you need a still, clear day.

Setting up consists of mounting the camera and adjusting its position so that the pivot point matches the nodal point of the lens in use. This is tested by rotating the camera from side to side and observing the relative positions of a couple of distant and near objects. When you hit the nodal point (by sliding the camera forwards and backwards) everything stays relatively in place and you are good to go – this is the most difficult thing that you have to do. The GigaPan also has to be levelled using the in-built bubble spirit level – we also employed the Virtual Horizon of our Nikon D700. With everything squared off, you follow the LCD screen instructions: first locating a horizon at the top and then the bottom of the camera screen (to teach the system the field of view). Then you locate the panorama top-left location and then the bottom-right location, by swinging the camera around. The system then computes how many rows and columns are going to be needed (it uses about 50% overlap) and how long the pan will take to accomplish. You are also warned to lock your zoom, focus, white balance and exposure before you begin. You can preview your pan at this stage by clicking the controls and the camera is sequentially moved around the scene for you – always a good idea at first as you want to be sure to get everything that you need into the frame.

For our waterfront pan we required 29 columns and just six rows, a total of 174 images. We shot at 200 ISO, using 1/160 at f16. This took 16 minutes to execute. Now a lot can happen in 16 minutes and we had to use the ‘pause panorama’ button to accommodate the arrival of an Irish ferry and the coming and going of the pilot cutter bringing the river pilots back from the bar. We also had to put up with the sun going behind the clouds for a few minutes and variable sunlight sweeping across the scene – you need to keep your wits about you and take the time to look over your shoulder and out across the scene at all times. We shot in JPEG for convenience; you need to ensure that you have enough Flash Card capacity if you are to avoid having to change cards, touching a rig such as this is never a smart move!

Back at base we used GigaPan Stitch to make the panorama. Once you have ‘added’ the files, you adjust the number of rows until the mosaic falls into place (this was obvious for our view, other scenes might require a little more care). We actually had a rogue duplicate file creep in, which threw the second half of the pan out of kilter – removing this file brought everything back into line. The stitching process took 7m 38s on a 64-bit work-station with 16 GB of RAM. This delivered a TIFF file which was 83,000 by 11,300 pixels weighing in at 2.62 GB. Everything about GigaPans is giga! The file contained a little short of a gigapixel (ie 1,000 megapixels). Opening the file into Photoshop took 31 seconds. Sharpening took 4m 15s. Adding a Levels Adjustment Layer took no time at all and adjustments were almost instantaneous. The demand on computing resources is very high, we were, by now pushing a 23.6 GB scratch file.

ABOVE: The Gigapan did a reasonable job of stitching a wide-angle pan of this kitchen but even so, the plug sockets near the centre were compromised.

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