Panaramic lens possibilities

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coldpenguin

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Could someone advise how useful I would find either of these two lenses for a panoramic shot? The camera I have is a Canon 400D

Last year I took many shots with the Canon EF28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM, trying to recreate a stichable scene into a panoramic.
A couple of them were usable, but many weren't.

So I was wondering, about the following two lenses, whether overall it would be easier to use a lens like these and crop/stretch it to a panoramic.
Can't find any example photos from the 4.5mm, and only a couple from the 8 which were probably taken on a 1.6x camera sensor.

Sigma/C 4.5mm f/2.8 EX DC HSM Circular Fisheye
Sigma/C 8mm f/3.5 EX DG Circular Fisheye
 
How did you take the pics and how did you stitch them together? I've taken some panoramics using my 400d kit lens and the stitching was fine....
 
Thanks for the photos.
The problems I had were I think down to bad vignetting on the 28 part of the lens.
I was using Photoshop CS2 for the stitching.

Shots which worked OK (I can't see the photos from this computer, hope they don't come out a ridiculous size),
http://86.165.52.214/2_copy.jpg
http://86.165.52.214/7_copy.jpg

Unfortunately I deleted all the panoramics which didn't really work. Here is the worst I could find at the mo (unedited so far)
http://86.165.52.214/4_copy.jpg

The technique I used to take the pictures was to set the camera to AV, to get a readout of the time for the center picture, then set to manual. As best I could, I tried to keep the end of the lens still as I turned around a point.

Staff Edit : Images changed to clickable links. Pictures must not exceed current forum limits as per the rules.
Please feel free to replace this with a fresh/resized image and remove this text :)
 
Have a play with Serif Panorama Plus, I find it works well for stitching, but I always try to use a tripod when possible.
 
Your pictures are FAR too big to see what's wrong (or right) with them.

Anyway, you really don't want any sort of fisheye lens to do panoramas. Your 28-135 should be fine.

If vignetting is an issue then it suggests you aren't overlapping successive frames enough. Aim for 33%-50% overlap.

Other than that it's hard to offer any constructive advice because your pictures are just far too big to take in.
 
Oops, sorry about that (unfortunately I cannot see the size my pictures come out on here, due to the way my router works, on my system they are scaled to the size of the window).
Hopefully this is more suitable, around 10% of the size.
I have been trying to cover basically 2 camera widths with 5 photos when taking the shots, although these pictures are made up of many more shots than that (picture called 2 is made up of 10 shots).
I have had a go at smothing out number 2, but the sky still looks like it is raining.
 
What sort of panoramas are you taking and how are you taking them?

Fisheye lenses are only good if you want to get 360x180 panoramas (e.g. HERE) in a small number of shots. These can be done using 200mm lenses but require many hundreds of shots. For these panoramas you really need to be rotating the camera around the nodal point of the lens using a special panoramic tripod head.

There is no real difference between this type and the type you have shown, I suspect the problem you have is the method of stitching you are using. I don't know how CS2 does it but it looks like it is having problems blending (and joining) the shots together perhaps you could give PTGui a try.

EDIT: As StewartR says you do need a good amount of overlap for your images (33% - 50% is good - I tend to use 33%).
 
I haven't got CS2 but from memory wasn't there an advanced or improved blending option somewhere? or was that only on CS?
The lens your asking about will make things much worse, the distortion on those will make the blending very difficult, the len you have should work fine, try coming off the 28mm end slightly (that should help the vingette a little) and work left to right, it shouldn't make a difference but it seems to on occasions, overlap a fair bit, I overlap at least a third, usually more. Wayne
 
Thank you, I shall try the other software mentioned, and also slightly more zoomed in, say 35-40 enough?
There is the option Advanced blending in photoshop, I had it turned on. Without it, the program just seems to cut straight (diagonal) lines through the photos.
 
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