Bokeh Panoramas or "The Brenizer Method"

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Omnis

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Well I was browsing flickr today and came across Ryan Brenizer and these two amazing shots of his: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carpeicthus/3554480740/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/carpeicthus/3582938326/

They're basically panoramas that let you get the frame of a wide lens and the depth of field of a fast telephoto. Read about it here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/PLNK1JWPN6/?tag=gtplanet-20
and then watch the video on how to do one here: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=575352237342

I went ahead and tried it out on a vase of roses in our living room. I did it in complete darkness with my flash, and wound up missing a chunk of the top of the frame that I eyed out. As a result, I had to crop out some roses and the tops of others. Anyway, here's the result at 75mm(x1.6) f/2.8 stitched together, and a comparison of the same shot at 28mm(x1.6) f/2.8 below it.

roses75mmpanorama.jpg


roses28mm.jpg


And then finally I bumped the contrast on the 75mm panorama:

roses75mmpanoramacontra.jpg


So has anyone else heard of this technique or has anyone put it to use? Share your examples in this thread.
 
I've never heard of a name for it before but I'm sure I've seen pictures of the technique in use. Thanks for the video tutorial link, I'm so going to try this out.
 
I'm also familiar with it. I've thought about doing it in the past as well but I never really got around to it. It has certainly inspired me, I might give it a shot this weekend.

Anyway, interesting photos, that Ryan Brenizer certainly seems to be pretty good at it.

Omnis, Out of curiosity, how many shots did you stitch together to make that one?
 
I'm not really understanding what exactly it is. All the examples of it just look like any other picture to me. Am I missing something?
 
Well there are two things that this method overcomes - the inherent deep depth of field in wide lenses and the compressed perspective found in longer (telephoto) lenses. Longer focal lengths often have a shallower depth of field, but they don't cover as wide a view. By stitching several shots taken with a telephoto lens, you can get both the desirable shallow depth of field (good for isolating the subjects) and the wide coverage. Notice that in the stitched shot there is a very narrow plane of focus, whilst in the normal, wide shot there is a deeper plane of focus and the background is more distracting.
 
Yes, blurring is easy to do in PS, but good blurring (emulating DOF or what is commonly referred to Bokeh) is quite hard to do well without it looking artificially added.

Also this technique not only give you a shallower depth of field but can also help you create larger resolution images at the same time (which is especially useful if you create large prints).
 
By large you mean feet across in dimensions...

Bokeh is the current trendy thing, PB, and people love it. To the point that people are taking pictures of nothing but out of focus stuff. No subject.

This method is neat, but ultimately impractical and, in my opinion, just a trend. A proper lens setup or aperture will usually work well, such as my 50mm f/1.8
 
Azuremen
By large you mean feet across in dimensions...

Bokeh is the current trendy thing, PB, and people love it. To the point that people are taking pictures of nothing but out of focus stuff. No subject.

This method is neat, but ultimately impractical and, in my opinion, just a trend. A proper lens setup or aperture will usually work well, such as my 50mm f/1.8
Click to expand...

Yeah but the point is to make ultra-resolution shots at de-facto apertures and focal lengths that would be physically impossible. A few of Brenizer's photos are a simulated f/0.7, for instance.

I think my picture was about eight or ten photos stitched together. I took like 20, but a lot of them were way out of frame because I was shooting in pitch black with my flash.
 
I like this effect a lot since it's very effective but also very subtle. Bit of a pain in the backside when planning your shots though!
 

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