Canon 11-24 L Lens: Anyone tried this for 360 Pano for Virtual Tours?

cayenne

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Mar 28, 2012
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HI all,
I've been watching a bunch of YouTube and reading some sights about shooting DSLR's (and I suppose mirrorless too) and stitching together panos for 360 shots to be used for Virtual tours (real estate, etc).

I have the Canon 11-24 L lens and was hoping to experiment with this since I have it on hand. I have a Really Right stuff Pano kit, I can use on my tripod....

So far, what I've read seems to indicate that fisheye is the way to go and one even seemed to say that a ultra wide rectilinear lens was, in fact, a BAD choice to use.

I just have a hard time believing that with such a good lens and so wide, combined with software that it would not work.

Any thoughts? Suggestions? Experience in trying to shoot this type of photography with this lens?

I"d be using it on my trusty old 5D3.

Thank you in advance,

cayenne
 

stevelee

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Have you tried it, since you have everything on hand?

I would expect that it would work great if someone wrote software explicitly for it. Using software made for fisheyes would seem a bad idea.

Using very wide lenses for stitching presents challenges because of the distortion of perspective near the edges. You probably want to zoom out and take more pictures.

But I don't have a lens that wide, so I can't speak from experience.
 
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cayenne

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Mar 28, 2012
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Thanks for the reply.
This is to stitch for a 360 pano...so, the fisheye look is normal for this.

I've been reading and looking around and it appears this may be possible...I'd have to shoot about 18 shots minimum for a room, rather than 4 with a true fisheye lens.

I'm going to make this a weekend project for my own house, but, need to clean it up a bit before I do that...it's a mess.
;)

Anyway, looks possible.

I'm kinda surprised no one else on the list here has chimed in, I'd have thought others would have done 360 panos before me on here.

I"m looking to maybe shoot the whole house and then experiment with using a site like: MetaReal. to put them all together into a Virtual Tour like real estate sites are doing these days.

cayenne
 
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stevelee

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I would have thought someone knowledgeable of specifics would have replied to you. I have done Quick Time VR 360°s maybe 15 years ago. I don’t know whether that technology is still supported. I lived in a house that had woods on three sides. On the front, there was a fair sized front yard, and a softball field was in front of that, and between the field and the road was a church cemetery, so I had huge open space. After a snow storm, I set up my tripod in the middle of the front yard and took a lot of pictures to stitch together for the 360 view. I liked the effect. I’ll check it out to see if it still works in a modern browser.
 
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Jan 29, 2011
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Certainly all the stitching software is optimized for the fisheyes I have done several 360’s with the 15mm but none with the 11-24. It seems serious shooters use the 8-15 zoom and high resolution bodies.

i have7et to throw anything at PTGui it can’t make sense of and the editing tools in there are insanely powerful should you get lineup errors.
 
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I have had very good experiences with an EOS R and the good old EF 16-35mm f4. I used it at 24mm. This gives me a stitched high resolution panorama of 28,000 x 14,000 (the R has 30 MP).

For this, 24 shots were taken: 12 at 0° vertical, 6 at +60°, 6 at -60° vertical.

One problem is the depth of field indoors. I worked at f11.

By the way, good stitching software is not optimised for fisheye lenses. I use PtGui and PtGui handles all lens types equally well.
 
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stevelee

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My best stitching experience has been with the 17mm and even better the 24mm TS-E lenses. They supposedly work even better if you have a clamp on the lens, so that the camera shifts instead of the lens, but I did fine without that. If you shift every direction, you get a huge picture. I used the 30° increments for 17 shots. I realize this is not applicable to 360° photos.
 
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