Michael Gardner

engineer, artist, photographer, panoramagrapher

I retired a few years back from the University of Illinois (I managed the campus network through most of it's existence). I now work in the family business, Story To Tell Productions, www.storytotell.me  I've been shooting panormas for many years, starting with a home made "megapan", based on a servo motor, microcontroller and an old Nikon camera. I could select 8 or 14 pictures per 360 degrees depending on whether I was using landscape or portrait orientation. I moved on to a different sort - 8 canon pocket cameras arranged on a circular platform running CHDK, all triggered off of their USB port, but also programmable to switch ISO, Focus mode, HDR sequences and so on. It was complicated and heavy, but I could take live 360 shots that resulted in images approximately 24Mpixels. I now have a modified Epic 100. I've also hand shot extensively along with tripod and monopod shots. I'm still learning the ins and outs of using the Panasonic G3 on my Epic and the various pieces of of software. I used Hugin extensively for some time, but the inability to handle Gigapan style input became a real problem. I moved on to Kolor APG - which has its own learning curve and quirks - but still has one major deficiency - lack of vignetting. Gigapan Stitch 1.0 suffered the same problem - 2.0 looks really interesting, as does EFX for the ability to reposition images.

Vignetting is important because neither Adobe Camera Raw, nor DXO or any other tool I can find has lens correction profiles for my combination of camera and lens.