"Wide angle" panoramas

[bennito42]

I am interested to know if anyone has been successful in using a 20mm W.A. lens for panoramas. I guess that because if the possible lens distortion, one would have to overlap the images by around 40 -50 %.
I have my doubts that this would be practical. So what is the widest wide angle that could be used ?
Camera , Canon 5D with Canon F2.8 20mm lens. I also have a Canon F4 28 - 105 .
Could the latter be suitable at the 28mm setting ?
Thanks, Peter B.

[Rattus79]

I use my 10-20 siggy for panos, I overlap by 30-40% As a general rule of thumb i take 3-5 shots in portrait and then another 2-3 in landscape to cover more of the sky.
todays software takes care of the lens distortion, but the only thing to combat paralax distortion is a panohead setup correctly.

[ricktas]

Yep. I have used lenses of less than 20 mm to take pano's. As stated it can get tricky with distortion cause by the widey (bowed horizons), but it is quite do-able.

[4wdexposure]

20mm is pretty wide on a full frame 5D (I've got one). I specialise in panoramas and while you can use a wide angle lens (apart from the nice perspective you can get in the cloud sometime) I never use something that wide for a stitched pano - only single shots. You'll get a much better result using something closer to 40mm and overlapping by about 30%. Stitching 7 or 8 images is no issue with today's software. You'll get heaps more detail in your shots this way. Just make sure you keep the exposure constant. The attached is made up out of 5 stitched images each made up of 3 exposures 2 stops apart.

CraigsHutwinter 1024.jpg