Thanks for posting, the question that popped in my mind was how the stiching around the edges of each frame could cope with the distortion, do you have to first crop each frame before stiching? or use lense correction in CS5?

Squamish, this is very helpful. I assume when doing the panorama images, you are using the same settings for aperature and WB and focus on the same spot or use MF. And as SkinBrit asked, what software do you use? Thanks.

I must confess, I don't often look at the PAD thread (might be something to do with never having taken the time to learn how to post there) but that shot is awesome SquamishPhoto. Are you able to post what a SINGLE frame looked like at 14mm from that location? When I looked at that shot initially I just thought you must have been standing on the grass far enough away to capture that panorama (sorry if that sounds dumb, I don't get time to shoot them). I'd be interested to see how much larger the perspective obtained by your stitching, is to a single 14mm shot. Also you don't say what software you used (or what software you could have used) for the result, is the stitching option available in most modern packages, or do you have to buy something bespoke?

As adamz said, thanks for sharing, you've given me the urge to try something new!

Wow very cool I always heard not to use wide angles for panos. Great idea and another reason to not believe everything you read on the internet. Images look great! :)

Beautiful result. Thank you for sharing.

nice one Mike - thanks for sharing Your technique

I believe in last months PAD thread Pierre asked about how I shot the panorama below at the focal length that I chose of 14mm.

So, first, sorry to Pierre for not replying more promptly. And second, here is a pic that shows you what another 14mm stitched pano looks like before any cropping has been done(16-20 image stitch, I think).

As you can see, the only real distortion thats suffered is forced to the perimeter in much the same way it does with a single frame. The beauty of the vertical stitching is that when you make the image large enough you can trim away all or most of the distorted frame and still be left with an image many times larger than a single FX frame. The thing to remember is to shoot a lot of overlap so that the software has the most amount of useful data to work with. It makes for longer processing times, but the results are worth however it long it might take you.

The cropping above is arbitrary for the sake of demonstration, but the great thing about starting with a large image is that its often not too difficult to crop farther down and even out of the frame and then use content aware software to fill or simply clone it in manually if its too tricky otherwise. Meaning that if the distortion is tolerable, and it quite often is with the 14-24, you can crop very little away with excellent results. Surprisingly, a lot of my final cropping dimensions are very close or exactly the same pixel dimension as a single frame would be, except that its taken mostly or completely from the lens' sweet spot and thus gives you a very different image than if you simply took a similar single framing at 14mm.