Exhibition!!!

[brammers]

I'd like to invite you all to my exhibition! It'll be starting on Friday 13th March and it's in... Beijing... So I guess not many of you will be coming along then :E If you do happen to be around Beijing then give me a shout and I'll send you directions!

What may still be of interest to you guys though is the panoramic shot. I took a shot of Harbin in winter which will run the entire length of the gallery - we were going for 7 meters but there was something on the way in the wall, so we had to settle for 4.6m. Even though I have a monster-resolution a900 this is something that you can all do - the point of panoramic stitching is that you make up for the lack of resolution by combining lots and lots of shots together. Here's what it looks like:





and the other shots in the exhibition.



Pano stitching is really easy. To start off with you need to lock EVERYTHING. Start off by locking your zoom setting - changing focal lengths throughout the sequence is going to screw things up. Lock your exposure (shutter speed, aperture, ISO) and if you're shooting JPG lock your white balance - in RAW you can set this afterwards. Finally lock your angles on your tripod - when you pan your tripod you want to make sure that you don't pan across and up, or up and to the side. Move the tripod in one axis only.

Set your focal length to encompass a much wider view than you want to end up with - what you'll find is that you get 'black corners' - areas where the camera misses the scene. If you're not careful you'll be using the clone tool to re-create a lot of these.

Finally, go home and stitch it all together using some software. I used to be a huge fan of Serif's Panoplus3, but unfortunately it won't output larger than a (frankly pathetic) 10,000 pixels. PS4 won't merge images correctly and is a bit fiddly - no preview for your panorama stitch type. So I've settled for PTGUI.

Give it a crack peeps - it's dead easy and you'll even get some good results hand-held.

[Virtual Monkey]

Panorama looks incredible - is it up online anywhere? I really like the bluish mountain landscape underneath it on the left aswell

I've done some pano stictching before, it's great for playing with composition. Photoshop has a pretty good stitching facility too.

Shame your exhibition isn't closer to home, would've like to have gone. How are you going to mount the photos btw? I'm mounting some stuff for interviews soon and would be interested to see your approach

[Funkstar]

Where do you get something like that printed?

I have a few panoramas I've taken in the past. Nothing spectacular, but would be good to see them printed, all be it slightly smaller than that

[brammers]

Here's the 2 panoramas:





These things don't look as good at 800 pixels...

I'm going to mount the small to large prints on standard card. The huge prints I'm still thinking about. One option is the kind of thick paper you see behind Chinese scroll paintings... This way I don't have to walk through Beijing with a delicate 4.5m long plank when delivering it and taking it away. Apparantly the photo paper might be a bit heavy for this though... Another option would be to use several pieces of card and re-assemble them at the gallery.

For printing I found a pretty awesome guy in a place called Wukesong - the city pano cost me a mere 25quid... Back in the UK - I don't even want to think about it. I got the snowboard shot printed in the UK before - I used a place called intelligence direct - they're great but a lot more expensive than China. Give them a google!

[Funkstar]

For printing I found a pretty awesome guy in a place called Wukesong - the city pano cost me a mere 25quid... Back in the UK - I don't even want to think about it. I got the snowboard shot printed in the UK before - I used a place called intelligence direct - they're great but a lot more expensive than China. Give them a google!

I thought you might have had them done in China, but wasn't sure

They are really nice!

[brammers]

Almost ready - should open tomorrow...

Here's the scroll - I really like it. Couple of problems - the paper curls at the end and I'm not sure where I can sign it. Still, I've not seen anyone do anything like this before, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Also a couple of publicity pieces - first one's got some grammar mistakes - don't worry I'm on them Still needs translating into Chinese too.

[Bobster]

too much text per line, try and keep it to 10-12 words for easy reading..

[brammers]

Sorry, should have explained. These are for display inside the gallery - hopefully people will have the time to read them. Not for distributing around.

[Bobster]

doesn't make any difference what their use is, its about making it easy for people to read, i wouldn't go much past line 2

[brammers]

Ah, we'll just have to disagree there. Remember that people are already in the gallery and there's only my work on display - I've already got their attention. These are also going to be printed a lot bigger - you're probably only viewing 60% at the moment. Yeah, it's a lot of text, but it's a history... It's kinda supposed to be...

[shiato storm]

nice finish on the roll/pano there. as for signing - bottom right is usually where I sign and put edition numbers. Aside from that its an awesome creation that pano...+4 meters! would probably cost hundreds to do over here!! hehe

[Bobster]

Ah, we'll just have to disagree there. Remember that people are already in the gallery and there's only my work on display - I've already got their attention. These are also going to be printed a lot bigger - you're probably only viewing 60% at the moment. Yeah, it's a lot of text, but it's a history... It's kinda supposed to be...

sorry, just re-read what i typed, what i meant was, you need to keep the lines to 10-12 words, not the whole thing, too many words per line makes it difficult for the eye to follow..

[brammers]

I usually do the same shiato, but usually I'm signing onto card which is white and takes a pencil really easily. This is cloth and there's no border - I've got the option of either signing directly onto the print or onto the cloth - both seem a bit odd to me. The Chinese would stamp their seal directly onto the painting, but I don't think that's the way forwards... Will have a think. About 5m including the scroll - the actual thing is 50,000 pixels so we could go for 7m, unfortunately the wall wasn't big enough! Next time. Hoping for some sales on this one and the big snowboard print - that looks great framed up properly.

Bobster - I've knocked up a couple more versions based on what you said. I'll print them all out and take them along - will see which one's we use. Here we are:

[Bobster]

huge improvement

just need to watch out for single words at the end of a paragraph

[Stoo]

I use autopano for stitching - pretty much no limit that I've found for size too - I've got a couple around the 50,000 pixel wide mark

http://www.autopano.net/

As for large pano prints I've had some success with posterxxl, although they've stopped accepting anything other than JPG on the website, you can still send a cd/dvd.

I might give http://largeformatonline.co.uk a try next time though, as thy don't seem to have many limitations on size

[brammers]

And a few shots from the exhibition itself to finish the thread. The framing is poor - it needs re-doing. Everything's on sale, we'll see how it goes.