One failed, one successful sweep pano with GX7

Out and about at 6am this morning with the P&O's Pacific Aria cruise ship due into Rabaul. Turned out I could have slept in a little; it was barely in sight when I got to my eerie and I had to wait about 40 minutes for it to "pose".

In the interim, I tried a few panoramas. Now, I mentioned in a post a couple of weeks ago that I did a sweep pano with the 12-35 set to 25 and it worked very well. Given the distances involved, I wanted to ramp that up for the shot I was taking today. I thought it would be nice with the 100-300 set to around 100. That wuld bring up the volcanoes very nicely behind the ship as she sailed in.

But repeated tests either elicited failure message about moving the camera too fast/too slow/not in the desired direction (all nonsense), or came up with this kind of result with the pano aborted in early acquisition:

Worked fine with the 12-35 on @ 26 except:

1. it seemed to want to never stop! I wanted to stop the thing just past the ship (sweeping left to right) but despite my removing my finger from the shutter button, it kept hammering away!
2. You can see a couple of joints, The most obvious one is a vertical bar about the width of the ship's length. It can be fixed, but…:

So -- a handy tool but not quite good enough to rely on in the GX7. Looking at the discussion on the G80/85, it looks as though there has been significant improvement of this tool.

Hen3ry wrote:

Out and about at 6am this morning with the P&O's Pacific Aria cruise ship due into Rabaul. Turned out I could have slept in a little; it was barely in sight when I got to my eerie and I had to wait about 40 minutes for it to "pose".

In the interim, I tried a few panoramas. Now, I mentioned in a post a couple of weeks ago that I did a sweep pano with the 12-35 set to 25 and it worked very well. Given the distances involved, I wanted to ramp that up for the shot I was taking today. I thought it would be nice with the 100-300 set to around 100. That wuld bring up the volcanoes very nicely behind the ship as she sailed in.

But repeated tests either elicited failure message about moving the camera too fast/too slow/not in the desired direction (all nonsense), or came up with this kind of result with the pano aborted in early acquisition:

Worked fine with the 12-35 on @ 26 except:

1. it seemed to want to never stop! I wanted to stop the thing just past the ship (sweeping left to right) but despite my removing my finger from the shutter button, it kept hammering away!
2. You can see a couple of joints, The most obvious one is a vertical bar about the width of the ship's length. It can be fixed, but…:

So -- a handy tool but not quite good enough to rely on in the GX7. Looking at the discussion on the G80/85, it looks as though there has been significant improvement of this tool.

I prefer the post stitch method. I'm not impressed with the panoramic feature on the GX7. Just give me in-camera frame guide, exposure lock on the first image then in camera stitching.

Yup, I think when at higher zoom levels the ground covered at a normal pan speed is too fast for the processor to cope with. Also, if handheld it is much harder to keep the camera level when panning. I noticed that the in camera panos on my FZ330 are very good but it is at a fixed 24mm example https://www.flickr.com/photos/dieselgolfer/29677360730/in/album-72157651603418606/ . Tried with the G7 + 14-140mm and got more failures than successes, with more success toward the wider end of the zoom range. It'll be interesting to see how the G80/85 performs, better I suspect due to more powerful processor.

Hen3ry wrote:

...

Worked fine with the 12-35 on @ 26 except:

1. it seemed to want to never stop! I wanted to stop the thing just past the ship (sweeping left to right) but despite my removing my finger from the shutter button, it kept hammering away!

It's hard to stop exactly where you want it to, but you can stop it about where we want:

Pan one or two exposures (clicks) past where you want to end the photo, and Just stop panning (or even pan backwards). It seems like the GX7 drops the last photo or two, which is why I say pan one or two exposures past. And of course the camera decides when it takes the photo, so the end probably won't be exactly where you want it to.

But you can exactly control the start of the pan, so either set the pan direction the other way, or flip the camera upside down, and pan the other direction.

But as others said, you have more control on PP stitching. What I do now is a couple autopanorama photos and then a set (or two) for PP stitching.

Hen3ry,

These are your very first attempts, and I think you have learned a lot. You'll do better, and sooner than you think.

As someone before, I believe that long tele  amplifies  your handshake and roughness of panning, so you'll make it with practice.

I had the GX7 for almost a year before switching to Olympus. The one thing I missed with the Oly was the in-camera panos. It took some practice With the GX7 but I got pretty good at it.

Lately, however, I've been having really good luck (actually better luck) using the Pano feature in Lightroom/Photoshop. It does a good job of alignment, and with content aware fill you can get the rough edges done nicely. Now I find it easier just to take multiple shots and not have to worry about the in-camara shooting requirements.

The GX7 Panos were fun, though...

You will get a higher resolution panorama and more flexibility if you you just take separate overlapping photos and stitch them later - I get excellent results using Lightroom.

Overlap your photos by about 1/3, take vertical photos for landscape panoramas and consider using the same exposure for each photo.

Geoff, like you I've never had much success with the GX7 and panos. The most successful ones have been taken using the 20mm 1.7 in single shots  in vertical position and then using Microsoft ICE (image composition editor). You can literally throw any number of shots at it and it will stitch together perfectly. Best of all, it's FREE!

Regards.

Jonantony.

Jonantony wrote:

Geoff, like you I've never had much success with the GX7 and panos. The most successful ones have been taken using the 20mm 1.7 in single shots in vertical position and then using Microsoft ICE (image composition editor). You can literally throw any number of shots at it and it will stitch together perfectly. Best of all, it's FREE!

I keep hearing about that, Jon. But then it doesn't run on a Mac, does it? Damn!

I do have PTGui which does a good job, but it is not fault free.

Many thanks, everyone.

I was intrigued by the in-camera Panorama capability but surprised by its limitations. As I noted, discussi9n of the G80/85 suggests some marked improvements in this tool.

I will do some more panoramas and will be using a bunch of shots and building the panorama in a dedicated app, PTGui.

I tried the short with the longer lens because I am particularly interested in avoiding the problem suffered by so many w/a and pano landscapes of mountains disappearing into molehills in the distance.