A fun and unusual family portrait....
(click for larger size)

The snow we had here just after Christmas was impressive – It measured 60cm on the garden table. It’s the first time we’ve had that much here since we moved to France nearly 10 years ago.

Having the family blocked in the house was a good opportunity for a fun family portrait. I decided to play with interior paranoramics.

Interior panoramic images present the greatest degree of difficulty for the panoramic photographer. The close up nature of the subjects requires that there be absolutely no parallex error when rotating the camara, otherwise the image stitching will fail. To achieve this the camera must be rotated precisely around the entrance pupil – there’s no room for sloppiness.

The image that I wanted to create required that the subjects would be very close the lens. The tiled floor would add to the stitching demands, but to really compound the problems the subjects would also be moving! I wanted my 2-year-old daughter to appear once with each person (and the cat)…

The camera was mounted vertically (so as to have a taller image) with the Canon 14mm MkII lens attached (this lens is sharper than my Sigma 15mm fisheye). I rotated the camera for each shot and moved people in and out as required.

The resulting images proved tricky to stitch because in some cases the subject would take up a significant proportion of one frame, but wouldn’t appear in the images to each side. In the end, and to my surprise, it was Photoshop CS 4 that came to the rescue. Each image was added as a layer and then aligned automatically – PS did a near perfect job with the exception of its choice of central position (which I had to change manually) . Since I still had my layers it was easy to mask in and out the subjects as required. Once I was happy the layers were blended together to remove all trace of the seams.

A fun result for a family portrait…

Note that I’m offering panoramic tuition as part of my new workshops.