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3 minute(s) of a 643 minute read
6-30-2011
I tried the "Brenizer Method" on a few images. If you're not familiar with it, you basically take a fast telephoto and shoot wide open on MF. Position yourself fairly close and take a bunch of shots to cover the area you want. Then stitch the images together in post processing. The end result is an "equivalent" image to one taken with a wider lens that is a very wide aperture (or conversely a camera with a much larger sensor). Often the resulting aperture is something that isn't physically available (especially if you start with a very fast lens to begin with). In essence, it gives you a nice blurry background with a wider frame of view than would normally be seen.
Here are my attempts. Info is below each image.
Camera: Canon 5D
Lens: Canon 70-200 f/2.8 IS
Focal Length: 200mm f/2.8
Stitched Image Size: 57MP
Equivalent Full Frame Lens: 95mm f/1.3
Equivalent 1.6x Crop Lens: 59mm f/0.85
Camera: Canon 5D
Lens: Canon 70-200 f/2.8 IS
Focal Length: 200mm f/2.8
Stitched Image Size: 71MP
Equivalent Full Frame Lens: 85mm f/1.2
Equivalent 1.6x Crop Lens: 53mm f/0.8
Camera: Canon 5D
Lens: Canon 70-200 f/2.8 IS
Focal Length: 200mm f/2.8
Stitched Image Size: 102MP
Equivalent Full Frame Lens: 70mm f/1.0
Equivalent 1.6x Crop Lens: 44mm f/0.7
The post processing work isn't perfect. When stitching together dozens of images the work goes very slowly. I may have been able to do better if I put more time into it, but I think they came out looking quite good. In the end I was hoping to get a faster "equivalent" aperture (most ended up being around 85mm f/1.2, which is a lens Canon actually does make), but you do see the desired affect is achieved. Ideally I would probably shoot the images with a 85mm f/1.2 or 135mm f/2.0, so that the resulting image would be a ridiculously low effective aperture, but I don't have either of those lenses.
The last one really starts to get the unreal "3D" effect I was going for, but I still think I could have done better. They key is to overlap just enough, but not too much. I really took way too many shots and it made it much harder for Photoshop to stitch them together. Most of the photos seen here were a few dozens shots, but by the end file size, it appears I could have done most with just 6-12 well placed photos. One other cool thing about this, is that it would allow a user with a 1.6x crop body to shoot full frame type images 