After shooting several months with the GoPro I realized I was missing a little bit of quality, and I wanted to push to the next level and add stereo capability. For this project I created a rotating disk to mount my Panasonic G7 on. A snow storm was heading to Yosemite, so I took the opportunity to use that camera for this project.

Pros

Reasonably simple in the field, just one camera and the disk had indents to keep the rotation angle consistent.

Good image quality. The G7 has good image quality with it’s micro 4/3rds sensor

Cons

Stereo was not real good. Some shots the “cha cha” method worked OK. Others there are noticeable glitches in the stereo effect. The precision is not good enough to get a consistent depth map. I spent some time working on this for the results above, but it was a lot of work, and like I said not very good.

Zenith and Nadir- I used the Rokinon 7.5mm lens which required an extra shot for the zenith. I tried to shoot the nadir also, but often would forget or it was blocked by the tripod.

Workflow

In Lightroom I used the Photomatix HDR plugin to combine the bracketed images into a TIFF.

Take the TIFFs and assemble in PTGui

Generate a MONO, left and right version using the mask technique

Nadir patch- This was interesting, I thought I would use Photoshop to erase the patch, but Photoshop Panorama editor is giving real bad color results, so I’ve posted them without nadir touchup.