Notes on Infinite Zoom and Panoramas

[Lin Evans]

I just wanted to pass along some of the things I'm learning about panoramas and large zoom in's.

As we all know, a good panorama with increased resolution can easily be made by stitching multiple frames into a seamless panorama with readily available software. The problem for those wanting to make deep zooms to show detail is how to exceed the proprietary boundaries of about 100% zoom and still stay within the RAM limitations of conventional video cards.

Another issue has presented itself, and that is how can the average photographer who doesn't have a wide assortment of focal lengths to work with (intermediate lenses) manage this with only perhaps a medium focal length lens and a long focal length lens?

It's easy enough to patch in individual frames for closeup's of of interest areas in the pano and zoom to the limits of propriety for your long zoom lenses if you have sufficient intermediary focal length captures, but if you don't have these intermediary lenses then how can you match the individual subject area sizes without having a black border around your frames? The answer is small intermediary panos.

When you take your original frames for the pano, then change lenses and go back to interest areas with your longer focal length lens but instead of shooting an individual frame, shoot above and beside your "target" sufficiently to product intermediary small panos to use for the patch. You can always zoom a pano out - that is, make it smaller on screen without loosing apparent image quality, but you can't zoom in much beyond 100% without sacrifice of apparent resolution. So by making intermediate small "panos" you will not have the problem of overzoom on the original to match the minimal zoom without frame borders being exposed on the patch frames used for the in-depth zooms.

Of course, as with any pano creation. Find the proper exposure via aperture and shutter speed and use these figures to effect capture in manual mode for each frame to facilitate color match and proper blend.

Best regards,

Lin