I got a
panoramic
lens that lets you take single shots that can be converted into
360°
QTVR
scenes. These are my first experiments...
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Yerba Buena Park
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It's really hard to focus when using this lens; it's hard to tell
what you're focusing on, because you have to eyeball it through
the viewfinder (autofocus gets very confused.) I guess the
reality is that you should always focus at infinity, but that
implies a high F stop, usually meaning a low shutter speed.
Previewing the image on the camera's display is pretty
useless too, since what the camera sees is this bizarre donut.
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Yerba Buena Park Waterfall
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There's also no hope for getting both sides of the scene exposed
properly unless the sun is directly overhead; some part of the
mirror will always be facing directly into the sun...
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Howard Street Pedestrian Bridge
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Check out the weird curvy lens flare around the sun!
The horizon is tilted in this image because I wasn't pointing
the camera straight up (as you can maybe see by my shadow).
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DNA Lounge Main Room
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I think it's safe to say that I'll never get a decent nightclub
shot with this lens; this is with all the lights on (handheld,
multi-second exposure, since I have the world's most useless
tripod).
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DNA Lounge Lounge
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This was a 30 second exposure. The room was dark, but still a
lot brighter than it would have been if the club were open.
Check out that groovy tentacle-flare again!
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DNA Lounge Roof
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This one's not bad, though again, the exposure is weird;
the buildings across the street look good, but the graffiti
on the back wall is all washed out.
I'm also a little surprised at how low resolution these
images are. The source images are 12 megapixel (4368×2912)
so I'd expect to get quite a bit more than a 450×300 view out
of them... I haven't done the math, though.
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Rincon Center
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Here it's obvious that depth-of-field remains a problem even in
very bright places. This was a 1/13 second exposure at F9.
I used such a large aperture in an attempt to get a huge depth
of field, but that didn't really work out. It looks like the
focus point is around 20' away.
Though it's a little hard to tell the difference between
blurriness caused by the image being out of focus, and
blurriness caused by the fact that the top and bottom of the
image are just less resolution due to fewer pixels being
captured for them.
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Here, I've extracted the rectangle containing Eric from the
raw donut image, without unwrapping it. Click for the
un-scaled image: that is the 100%-zoom view of that part of
the image, and it's only ~900 pixels tall, from floor to
ceiling. So after the parabolic mirror (optically) packs the
image up into that donut, it seems that there just isn't that
much useful pixel data left out of the original
4368×2912 image.
This is what the photo the camera actually takes looks like.
(Click for a larger, but still scaled down, version.)
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