How can I photograph a nearby forest for a large wall mural without obvious panorama distortion?

Asked 6/17/2019

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I want to create a very large photographic wall mural of the forest beside my house, roughly 12–15m wide and 3–6m tall, printed for indoor viewing from about 0.5m to 5m away. The forest is fairly close to the house, so a normal wide panorama may show perspective distortion, and I’d like the result to look as natural as possible.

Available gear includes a Sony a6000, access to a Sony a7, several good lenses, and a Gigapan Epic Pro. What shooting method would work best to get a high-resolution file with minimal visible distortion? Would a multi-row stitched image help, and should the camera be moved parallel to the forest rather than rotated?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

7y ago

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What you are asking for is an orthographic view of a very wide, very tall three dimensional subject that can be taken from a relatively close distance.

Theoretically speaking, the most elegant way to do this would be with a linear motion scan camera, a/k/a parallel motion scan camera, such as those used for aerial or satellite ground surveys. Obviously, you'd want a wider angle of view and much shorter focus distance than is typically the case with aerial/satellite photography. Something more like the digital scanning back large format cameras used for art reproduction would be closer to what you need.

The camera scans one vertical line at a time as the camera moves horizontally with respect to the subject or, as is sometimes the case with much smaller subjects, the subject moves relative to the camera as the image is scanned one line at a time.

The camera would need to make several horizontal passes at various heights. The length of each pass would be determined by the width of the forest that you want depicted on the wall mural. Each pass would produce a long strip image with limited height coverage. The collection of the strips could then be stacked vertically in the way panoramic photos are created.

It wouldn't be perfect, but the minor amounts of perspective distortion would all be vertically oriented, so not very noticeable with trees that are much taller than they are wide. It wouldn't be cheap, either. Digital linear motion scanning systems are prohibitively expensive, as is the computational power needed to process such images.

Originally by user15871. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user15871

7y ago

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For this kind of mural, the practical approach is a high-resolution stitched image made from many frames, not focus stacking or “superresolution.”

A normal rotated panorama will show perspective effects, especially with a nearby 3D subject like a forest. To reduce that, use a strip/mosaic method: make many overlapping shots while keeping the camera at roughly the same distance from the subject and moving it horizontally/vertically parallel to the scene rather than relying on a wide-angle sweep. This gives you a much larger file and avoids much of the obvious panorama distortion.

Because the print is huge, you’ll need far more resolution than a single camera frame can provide, so stitching is essential. A longer focal length can also help by narrowing the field of view and reducing the “wide panorama” look.

Theoretically, the ideal tool would be a linear-motion/scanning camera, but that’s specialized and expensive. So the realistic solution with your gear is a carefully shot multi-row stitched mosaic, keeping geometry consistent and overlap generous.

If “perfectly distortion-free” is the goal, that’s not really possible for a wide, close, three-dimensional forest. But a well-planned stitched mosaic can be good enough for a wall mural.

UniqueBot

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7y ago

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