Ultra Digital XPan - Part 2

In the last post I introduced my 'Ultra Digital XPan' set up, which looks like this in portrait mode:

 

Using my geared head, on a good tripod, gives me solid positional control over composition. To complement the internal levelling guide in my Canon R, I've added a three axis cold shoe bubble level. Finally, I use my H&Y Revoring filter holder, to handle my 82mm filters, thus allowing me to add front filters, for example, on my 720nm IR converted RP I can add a 830nm cut filter.

As mentioned in the previous post, using dual shifts, in conjunction with the Magic Shift Converter optics, I can realise shifts of some 62mm, ie over 30mm in each direction.This allows me, as shown in the last post, to create 4:1 near parallax free captures. I say near, as the lens does move relative to the camera on one of the adapters. 

The resultant stitched image being equivalent to a single image being taken with a sensor that is some 100mm x 25mm.

In this post I will discuss using the set up, in the field, in 'true' XPan aspect ratio mode; that is seeking to maximise the pixel capture. 

To achieve this, as shown in the picture above, the camera is placed in portrait capture orientation, to ensure a 36mm sensor height, compared to an XPan negative of some 24mm.

As I was feeling lazy, the test subject is a view 50m from my house. I was using my Canon R and my 80mm Mamiya 645 lens.

Having explored the exposure extremes with my camera's histogram, ie shifting across the full shift range, setting focus and aperature (f/11 in this case), I took a seven image pano bracket set that looks like this:

The two extreme captures represent the 10mm shifting using the Magic Shift Converter, whilst the other captures cover the physical 30mm shift of the Kipon 645 to EF shift adapter, with the MSC at zero. The Kipon shift then ends up as 30*1.4 mm after passing through the MSC adapter’s optics.

After preprocessing in Lightroom, using DXO  PureRaw 5 in this case, I processed the pano bracket set using Lightroom’s Photo Merge, using Perspective projection.

This resulted in a 16165x6782 image, equivalent to a 86x36mm sensor, ie larger than a classic film XPan negative, of 65x24mm.

After cropping the image to an XPan format (65:24), the final, digitally mounted, image looks like this (greatly scaled here because of its size):

To give a feel for the details, here is a 1:1 screen capture of a part of the image:

As far as I'm concerned the experiment has been a great success and I'm content I've got a usable digital XPan-like set up, albeit using medium format Mamiya film lenses.

As usual I would welcome any comments on the above or any of my posts.