I wanted to share progress on a project I’m working on. It is still very much in the prototyping phase but I’m pretty happy with the progress so far and it is fully functional.
The project is a Planar Stitching Back adapter for cameras. For about 20 years I have been creating my photographs by stitching together many smaller images captured using a Spherical Panorama Head, a very simple device that rotates the camera around the point inside the lens where there is no parallax. Recently I wanted to try doing planar stitching. This is just shifting the camera sensor while keeping it parallel to the lens plane.
The idea was to create an adapter that could be mounted to different cameras and allow me to use a very small mirrorless camera to capture the images for stitching.
Stitching is simply dividing the scene into smaller parts and then combining them into one larger image.
There are three components to this.
- Camera Adapter
- Composing Back
- Stitching Back
The adapter is attached to the camera and allows me to mate the composing back and the stitching back.
The composing back is like the ground glass on a view camera or the focusing screen inside an SLR. It just allows me to frame and compose the scene.
Then the stitching back is swapped in place of the composing back with the mirrorless camera mounted to it. The stitching back allows you to index or move the camera into one of 8 positions. Each one perfectly aligned and comprising 1/8th of the entire scene. The 8 images are combined in software into one larger image
Although it’s in prototype it is fully functional and works really well. To complete it, I need to devise a more practical way to attach all the pieces. I may end up using locating pins and magnets or something like that.
A stitched image.
to help come up with a solution!