Saturday, August 19, 2023

Medium Format Panoramas with the EOS R

In previous posts I've covered how I use sensor bracketing to create larger formats than the native sensor size, eg: here and here, and in many other posts.

One of the advantages of using mirrorless cameras is the wide availability of adapters, that allow you to adapt lenses with a larger image circle, for example, in my case:

  • EOS M camera to EOS lenses
  • EOS R camera to Mamiya 645 lenses

In this post I'll discuss my latest experiment in getting close to a digital 617 film camera, for example the FujiFilm G617, some 60x170 mm.

My starting point is a RhinoCam Vertex Rotating Stitching Adapter from Fotodiox, which connects my EOS R to one of my Mamiya 645 lenses.

Using this set up I'm able to create 1x1 645 images some 8896 x 8866 in size, from four brackets, ie a 1x1 quad.

To emulate the FujiFilm G617 I additionally need to carry out a pano rotation. To ensure sufficient overlap at 45mm, and to exploit a clickable pano rotator I already have, I selected 45 degree of rotation between each 1x1 quad captures, ie 3 clicks of 15 degrees.

To illustrate how all this turns out I took a test image in my garden, albeit on a windy day :-(, using my EOS R and a Mamiya 645 45mm lens.

For reference the 1x1 645 quad looks like this (note I didn't get the ETTR exposure right in this test):


The above quad is 8896 x 8866 in size and, of course, shot through a MF lens.

Repeating the above twice more, every 45 degrees, ie obtaining three quads worth of images, 12 full frame brackets, results in the following Lightroom pano merge (in this case I used spherical projection):


The above image is 22923 x 8963 in size: some 205 MP image. As I said above, I didn't attempt to nail the exposure, so the sky is blown out, as I was just testing my workflow.

After some post procesing the image looks like this:


A digital 185 MP, 617 image, 22922 x 8090 in size, taken with a Mamiya 645, 45mm lens with an EOS R 'adapted digital back'.

All good fun stuff.

As usual I welcome any comments on this post or any of my posts.





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