What is absolute minmum equipment required to make own HDRI skies?

[Morne]

Hi all

Well as the title says. Can this be done with an entry level camera like the Nikon D90? What minimum lens/tripod/camera body and other stuff do I need to do this? Rough cost for the equipment and software?

[instinct]

You can create HDRIs with pretty much any camera that allows for manual setting of the exposure. The more money you invest the better quality and the better the usability and the quicker the creation of the final images will be. You can hoever create HDRIs with a simple tripod, a camera with manual exposure setting and a stitching tool like PTGui (starting at 79€ for a personal standard lic, or 149€ for a personal pro license (with direct creation of HDRs from bracketed sequences).

Regards,
Thorsten

[Morne]

You can create HDRIs with pretty much any camera that allows for manual setting of the exposure. The more money you invest the better quality and the better the usability and the quicker the creation of the final images will be. You can hoever create HDRIs with a simple tripod, a camera with manual exposure setting and a stitching tool like PTGui (starting at 79€ for a personal standard lic, or 149€ for a personal pro license (with direct creation of HDRs from bracketed sequences).

Regards,
Thorsten

What do you mean by "bracketed sequences"? You mean I have to take a photo, turn the tripod a bit, take another photo, turn, etc. Can this be done manually or do you need to turn accuratley by a certain degree each time? After the 20 or 30 or whatever pics are taking I can then just stitch it automatically with the program you mentioned. How about stitching it with photoshop? I've somewhere that some people use fish eye lenses and fancy things like that. Technically how could something like that benifit me?

(sorry for the stupid questions, just never done this before)

Also, when you say manual exposure, I have to take the same pic with different exposures or how does that work?

[instinct]

bracketed means different exposures. So you'd have 3 different exposures for each images. You have to make the bracketed images and then turn a few degrees, shoot the next set etc. The exposures chosen should be the same for all positions. Stitching "automatically" depends a lot on the images. Esp. for Sky images this is tricky as there's very few control points for the software to figure out proper positioning and warping.
"Exact" offsets help a lot to ensure image quality and straight forward stitching/assembling. They are not necessary per se tho. We use a panohead for automatic shooting.

There are different ways and programs for both stitching panoramas and assembling HDRs. There's a lot of free ones tho. I speak out for PTGui tho. We use it to create high resolution (20k) and high quality HDRs and it's a damn nice piece of software and worth the money in my eyes.

Panoramatools and PTStitcher would be examples of free software. There are many more tho. http://www.all-in-one.ee/~dersch/

Regards,
Thorsten

[Morne]

thanks. I think I'll look up this "panohead" thing you are talking about
I'm happy paying 149€ for the software. Wonder how much this panohead goodie costs

Why do I need 3 different exposures for each image? I thought you set the exposure afterwards in something like photoshop

[instinct]

Well if you only shoot one exposure then you get a panorama, but it wont be HDR but LDR.

[Morne]

anywhere where I can get more info on this? So if I shoot with 3 exposures, it will interpolate the exposures in between and thats how vray knows how to adjust the exposure of the file?

[instinct]

Well the idea of HDR images is to have more dynamic range then normal images can handle. Both in range ( = values above 1) and in resolution (beeing floating point). So naturally LDR images taken with a normal camera are not able to capture or store that additional information. So the workflow is to shoot the same image at different exposures and merge them to a normal HDR image. This can be done in PS, HDRshop, directly in PTGui or whatever software you prefer.

You can find more information here for example: http://www.hdrlabs.com/
Or with one of the inventors Paul Debevec at debevec.com

Regards,
Thorsten

[dellis]

Thorsten,

Do you guys shoot in RAW format?

[instinct]

Yes, sure do. That way you need less brackets for the same dynamic range

[rhino]

http://www.hdrlabs.com is a great resource for HDRI related info

[pailhead]

The clouds in the sky movie fairly fast, i dont think you'll be able to shoot good HDRI with normal camera and a manual head. 3 stops wont give you that much of a range, the canon 1D has 7 stops. Plus, you can get ghostin in just one position if the exposures are two long. I've no idea how many photos you need to shoot in order to get a full panorama.

[instinct]

3 stops wont give you debevec like dynamic range but works fairly well depending on what you do with them and of course the camera and how well the stops are chosen. The 5DMK2 has 10.x stops when shooting raw (wich you definately shoot).

The amount of photos depends on the lens used. This also affects the final resolution of course. The wider the lens, the less photos, the less resolution, the harder the stitching as a rule of thumb. A usual HDR here is targeting between 25k and 30k for max resolution.

Regards,
Thorsten

[Morne]

A replacement for the Nikon D90 had just been launched a day or 2 ago. The Nikon D7000 replaces the D90.
I don't know anything about the technical stuff of cameras. Please could you take a look at the review below and tell me if it is worth while for entry level to mid range HDRI type stuff, and maybe even TOP range HDRI stuff.
http://www.dpreview.com/previews/nikond7000/

Thank you in advance

[plastic_]

D7000:
AE Bracketing 2 to 3 frames in 1/3, 1/2, 2/3 or 1EV increments

as I understand it you can auto-bracket 3 shots with +-1EV...that's not too exiting.

I tried with my Canon 5d II, it can do +-2EV with 3 shots....that's not really a great range either, but better.
You can remote control this cameras with a laptop though, for a greater exposure range and more flexibility.
However, shooting hdri panoramas is not as fun as you might imagine.
I tried it once, and quickly gave up.