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Tunnel vision – photo stitching and stereographic projections

I’ve been on a photo stitching journey. (Why is everything a ‘journey’ or a ”story’; aren’t we just doing stuff? I blame adverts, specifically bank adverts. More specifically, the ones where the soundtrack is an ’80s song played at half speed on a ukulele and sung by some drippy hipster trying to be really, really sensitive.)

My journey doing stuff with photo stitching started out when I came across Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor (ICE) software. I’d seen ‘small planet’ projections, thought they looked like fun, so downloaded the software to see if I could make a small planet.

I stuck my GR on a small tripod using a ball head and rattled off some pics in the park. Churned them through ICE. And the results were really pretty good. And there’s the start of a slippery slope; ‘pretty good’ was certainly encouraging… but not good enough.

So… here’s what I’ve learned about stereographic projections (and other composite images).

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Depth of field, focal lengths and sensor sizes

I like photographing people. I also like to carry a small camera around.

Photos of people generally look better when you separate the subject from the background using a narrow depth of field.

So do I lose a narrow depth of field when I use my Ricoh GR compared to my 1DS? Or more interestingly, a crop sensor DSLR compared to my 1DS?

None of the explanations on depth of field and sensor size I have read on the web quite made sense to me, and some seemed plain wrong, so I thought I’d do some comparisons…

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