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How I built my Arduino-powered automatic pan-tilt head for shooting stitched panoramic landscapes

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Shooting multi-frame panorama photographs can be fun, and the resulting images can be striking. But once you get past a panorama that is, say, four or five frames wide, it becomes difficult to do without a tripod. And if you want a panorama that is more than one frame in height, then hand-held is nigh impossible.

There are manual panorama heads you can mount on your tripod, but using one can become a bit tedious, especially shooting a dozen or so frames. They become more onerous when you want a pano that is several rows high.

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Shooting Brenizer method portraits on medium format film to simulate a large format look

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The Brenizer method has been around for a while. In fact, it’s been around since long before it was called the “Brenizer method” – he was just the guy who made it popular so the name stuck. Essentially it’s a way to simulate the look of medium format film when shooting a small sensor camera like an APS-C or full-frame DSLR or mirrorless camera.

It’s a popular and well-known technique these days, but what happens when you shoot it with medium format film? Will it look like it was shot on large format? That’s what photographer Steve Schultz wanted to find out, so he shot some with his Mamiya 645 AF medium format film camera to see what happened.

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Capture One 22 lets you stitch panoramics and create merged HDR images – releasing on December 9th

Capture One has announced its new Capture One 22 software. Or at least, they’ve announced that it’s coming. With a release date of December 9th, it brings with it two pretty significant and highly requested features. The first is native panoramic stitching. Yes, that’s right. No longer do you need to export them out and bring them into another piece of software, you can now stitch from within Capture One itself straight from your raw files.

The new Capture One 22 is also able to create merged HDR files within the software as well, allowing you to exceed the dynamic range of just a single raw file for maximum versatility in high contrast scenes. Unfortunately, there’s no teaser video yet showing these new features in action, but they do have a live stream scheduled on their YouTube channel for December 9th when it’s officially released.

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How to shoot your photos for making stitched panoramas in post

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Are your lenses not quite wide enough to get that landscape shot you want? Or perhaps your camera’s resolution isn’t quite high enough to print it as big as you want to? Well, that’s where stitched panoramas come into play. The process is fairly straightforward and offers a lot of advantages over just using a wide lens, but there are a few gotchas.

In this video, landscape photographer Nigel Danson walks us through his process of making stitched panoramas covering everything from the different shooting techniques to how to actually stitch them together in the computer.

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How to make a 3D printed panoramic head that lets you shoot 12K 360° images with a GoPro

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There are a lot of choices out there these when it comes to 360° cameras, and while many of them are very good, the really good ones capable of shooting super high resolution are extremely expensive. But all is not lost. You can still get very high resolution 360° my simply stitching multiple shots from a regular camera together. Even something like a GoPro action camera.

In this video from My Tech Fun, we see how we can use a 3D printed panoramic mount (also designed by My Tech Fun – and free to download) in order to shoot 12K 360° images with an action camera. While GoPro does have their own 360° camera, this will offer a lot more resolution and detail when zooming through the image on the desktop.

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How to quickly use Photoshop to correct severe distortion for perfect panoramics

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I make quite a few stitched panoramics. Occasionally I shoot them when I go on holiday and find a cool place. Mostly, though, I shoot them when I’m location scouting. When I come across a new area to potentially photograph somebody in the future, I fire off a few shots to stitch in post. They’re very handy for that. But they often suffer from the same problem. All kinds of warping and perspective issues.

The effect is bad enough if your lens already has some natural distortion of its own. When multiple images are stitched it worsens the issue. This video from photographer Rex Jones comes to the rescue, though, showing us how we can correct it in Photoshop. A great method for perfect distortion free images.

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Shooting a 300MP photo of a Hotrod – full frame digital vs large format film

Recently, I was tasked with shooting a hotrod. It was exciting from the beginning, because these kinds of cars are pretty rare here. The owner also wanted his dog sitting on the fender. When you hear that (from a photographer’s point of view), it does not sound that difficult to do. But the picture also has to be huge – 100 megapixel are too few.

Three times of that is the minimum requirement for the print. A digital medium format camera gives you 100 Megapixel, maximum 200 in one shot. These are not that easy to rent and they are very expensive too.

My solution was to do a stitched panorama digitally with Canon 5D mkIII, Canon 100mm Macro and the Nodal ninja. Additionally, I shot with my large format camera, a Linhof Mastertechnika with a Kodak Portra 160 VC sheet film.

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Photographer makes multitasking in the kitchen a breeze with some post processing magic

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For most of us, it seems like there just isn’t enough time in the day. With a little help from Photoshop, photographer Sarah Santiny found the perfect multitasking solution. This really is levitation photography taken to the extreme.

When I saw the above image scroll though my Facebook feed, it drew me right in. The idea is fantastic, and the execution equally as good. So, DIYP got in touch with Sarah to get some insight into how the idea came about and was made.

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How to deal with difficult panoramic image stitching in Photoshop the easy way

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With the speed boosts and memory capacities of modern computers, stitching multiple shots together to make larger panoramic images has become a very common technique used by many photographers.  Chances are, if you’re reading this, you probably have too, or you’ve at least thought about giving it a go.

While most stitches go pretty well, there are times when Photoshop isn’t quite sure what you want it to do, and gives you a result you definitely didn’t expect.  In this video tutorial from Photoshop wizard Jimmy McIntyre, we see some pretty in-depth techniques for recognising these issues and how to overcome them.

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