Alton Towers planets

[Martyn]

After DoN posted my first sighting on this technique in the Lens Flair topic, I had to give it a go:

http://forums.finalgear.com/showthread.php?p=432310#432310

Thanks DoN for revealing all, I've been loving it so far!

Anyway, I went to Alton Towers and gave a few planets a go!

Spinball Whizzer

Rita: Queen of Speed

Air

Nemesis

Oblivion

 

[Blythy]

cool effect, air looks great, but the nemesis one would be better imo if the closest one was a bit further away and a bit clearer - then it would be the best by far.

still, cool looking one

 

[Alok]

this requires extra lens adapters, am i right?

 

[BerserkerCatSplat]

^I don't think so, I believe its a 2-plane 360 degree panorama merged in software.

 

[essentialatom]

These are incredible, wonderful stuff! As I look at them I'm trying to imagine what the panoramas they come from must look like. Any chance you could up them so that we can see?

 

[Alok]

martyn, can u please post a mini tutorial for dummies?

 

[XYZviper]

martyn, can u please post a mini tutorial for dummies?

I second that!

 

[Martyn]

Sorry, I hadn't noticed the requests!

Yes, they begin life as ful 360 degree panoramics, but multi layer. Most of them are six or seven layers, just to make sure there's enough overlap, you need a lot of sky in the shot aswell, and you need to shoot as much of the ground as possible aswell (I can imagine I looked a bit foolish going round in circles taking photos of my shoes :lol

I shot these at 14mm, just because I figured shooting at 10mm would give too much distortion for the stitching and I just wanted to shoot as wide as possible. I guess you can shoot at whatever focal length you want, but the more you use, the more pictures you have to take.
These, for example, used around 60-70 source pictures.

They're then stitched in autostitch which drinks your RAM and renders your computer useless for at least an hour, even when producing an output of 5000px high!

You can then take the output pano and run the polar coordinates filter on it in photoshop or if you want some better and more scaled results, use Hugin Panorama Tools to create a stereographic image. Then a bit of tweaking in Photoshop and that's it!


I made another one on Sunday, of Stealth at Thorpe Park!