The New York Times On-Line edition published a fascinating article today on a new technology for composing panoramas:

Gigapan Robot

The article points to the test results available on this website:

Gigapan.org

Not the first time an electronic device has come to the aid of photography either opening new vistas or enabling easier and more sophisticated ways of achieving old ones. The question arises: is it art? And another one: is there a point at which gadgets completely replace creativity, and if so, does that mean it can't be art?

I point my (hypothetical) 8x10 view camera at something pretty and press the shutter. Is it art? (In my case, probably not.) I point my Gigapan Robot at something and press the Go switch. Is it art?

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net

This is what it's coming to. Set camera, push button. Crop. The machine does it all except crop and some PS post processing, like "Push button for cooler sky."

No, but it looks like one heck of a photograph!

I really don't see how this is different from any other panoramic application. You get your nodal ninjas, or RRS pano platforms and you're carefully rotating the camera around preset angles. Why not get a computer to automate that for you. I fail to see how spinning the camera around a pano-head is more artful than letting the computer do it. What you point it at and when and how you process and display the final work is what adds the "art" to your project. I fail to see how this thing could is at all a threat to anyone's artistic integrity.

This is how I understood teh essay, which could be inaccurate becsaue I read it fast:


What I "think" it does, and yes you could do it yourself but it would be really hard, is to take vertical and horizontal shots of the landscape--using a 600MM lens, for example--so your resolution when looking at the "far away" horizon has detail it would have if you had a 600MM wide angle lens, which is impossible by definition.

It looks like this:

********
********
********
********
********

* = image

It adjusts the focus to match the focus of the further away shots to the foreground shots, for lack of an elegant explanation. So each snap is in focus relative to the last snap. That's what the computer does. It doesn't just take say 6 images horizontally (Again, how I understood it). I think it takes, for one single pano, maybe 100+. Then stitches them automatically. Each image is in sharp focus. So you end up with a pano shot at 600MM with DoF as sharp in the foreground as it is in the background. Your DoF is now effectively as close as your lens can focus all the way to infinity.

This is a great "reportage" technique. I really enjoyed looking over the "waffle" structure at Burning Man. One of those images that looks awesome, then you zoom in and are blown away. Well, I am at least. Check it out here.

Didn't we just decide that it isn't the camera that doesn't not matter in the slightest ??? (Or was it actually the other way round?)

my gigapan unit will arrive next week. i hav shot and stitched hundreds of panos,
some 200 or more shots so i can print with detail. occasionally i get asked for a 4'X8'
print and i get to see things that just don't show up in a 24"X36" print. i figure the gigapan will let me set my camera up in places i would be uncomfortable shooting manually. like on a thin ledge on a sheer wall. and if it repeats with some precision this
will let me exposure bracket big panos for hdr. so how does a stitched pano shot with a 600mm lens on a 5d differ from a picture taken with a 600mm lens on an 11X14 camera if the field of view is the same?
enjoy,
vincent

I just received today the Automate 1.0 from Thegatgetworks, i plan to use it with 1ds2 and 300/4, 70-200/2,8 and 85/1,8 ... i hope can tell you much more next monday.

Jaime

with more choices for automating the pano making process and even microsoft introducing their photosynth technology i wonder how soon camera manufacturers will begin supporting these technologies. gigapixel imaging for a few hundred dollars. how suspicious were photographers when autofocus or lightmeters introduced which automated tedious manual practices? a cheap robotic XY grid on a frame mounted on a large format camera would demystify a lot of things. it's time for me to scarf up an 8x10 arca before they come back into fashion.
enjoy,
vincent

Interesting, it appears from the FAQ at the site that the Gigapan is currently only designed to work with digital point and shoot cameras and that at present there are no plans to produce one for DSLRs or other systems.

They did mention in the FAQ that they offer plans for making one of your own.

Jay

if you google around you will find that many have moded their gigapan to hold their 5d or d200.
i'm thinking a 450d with the 70-200 f/4is and making a trigger out of an old remote cable instead of having the "gigapan finger" press the shutter button.
enjoy,
vincent

Anyone got a link that actually describes this system in detail? All I can find are sites proclaiming GigaPan's wondrousness.

As someone who has spent much of the last year learning to create panoramas (mostly sphericals) using "conventional" techniques (NN3, PTGui etc), I can't help being suspicious of these "does it all without any intervention" claims. Any way you look at it making mosaics involves dealing with the problem of elements moving between shots, lens distortion characteristics etc - not to mention parallax. How Gigapan is supposed to simply sweep these difficult (I would say quite intractable) problems aside isn't clear to me.

More information please! Anyone actually used this device?

I have been using the Automate 1.0 from thegadgetworks, this is supossed for dslr cameras, you can see my first try with it at

http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=9037

for this shot, i stitched 148 photographs from 1ds2 and 70-200/2,8 at 135mm, this is a heavy combo, i think a 5d and 70-200/4 is close to ideal, but thats what i own... anyway, 5d2 could change thigs a lot.

This camera mount cant be set around nodal point, but for the kind of shot i want it this is not a problem, the problem here is that tif format is limited to 30.000 pixels by side, so i saved to jpg wich limit is 64.000 pixels by side, but i cant open it in cs3 to edit.

Jaime

Here you can find info about Automate, the motorised pano head for dslr i´m using instead of gigapan hardware

http://www.thegadgetworks.com/index.html

but if you prefer diy, you will find that astrophotography gear is your answer.

http://www.autopano.net/forum/t3092-merlin-orion-interface

Jaime