Ultra Wide 'digital XPan'

This post is really an excuse to play around with my new laptop. 

As a lifelong Windows guy, I finally took the plunge and got myself my first Apple Laptop: a MacBook M5 with 1TB storage and 24GB of memory.

So, today's experiment was how to create an ultra wide 'digital XPan', using sensor bracketing, and process the result in Lightroom.

I used two adapters. First a Laowa 15mm f/4.5 Zero-D Shift EF mount lens, with a +/- 11mm shift, with an advertised image circle of 65mm:

Between the lens and my Canon R, I used a Laowa EF-RF Magic Shift Converter (MSC), which has the impact of converting the 22mm shift of the Zero-D to just over 30mm. Thus, by shifting left and right, and taking a centre image, I can realise a flat, digital image that is 66mm x 24mm. It also means I have a 15x1.4mm focal length equivalent, ie 21mm and the image circle is 65x1.4mm.

In this experiment I didn't shift the MSC, which I could have done by 20mm, ie +/- 10mm. That is creating a 86x24mm digital, flat stitched image.

Of course using the Zero-D with the Magic Shift potentially can't be ignored in terms of image quality, but as photography is subjective, let's look at a test I just carried out.

The test stiched image is 12473x4474, which at a Canon R pitch of 5.36 microns, gives us a near perfect XPan digital emulation, ie 66.85mm x 23.98mm.

But what about image quality, especially in the corners?

The following are crops from the four corners, that I think look OK, ie noting that there is no distortion correction applied in Lightroom:

So, there you have it, in addition to using Mamiya 645 lenses to create the digital sensor equivalent of an XPan, I can now carry around a 21mm digital XPan, thanks to two Laowa technologies.

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