Cambo Actar 60mm – Stitching Images

Following on from our shoot with the Actar 24mm, we were in a good location to capture images with the recently launched Actar 60mm f4 lens.

Within half an hour of shooting with the 24mm the light turned golden and although it looked warmer, trust me it was much colder!

 The Actar 60mm is supplied fitted with a lens plate that slots directly in the front standard of the Cambo Actus camera platform. It is compatible with Mirrorless cameras. The large image circle of 75mm enables you to shift the camera body 19mm left and 19mm right, a huge 38mm shift producing an effective 66mm x 54mm stitched sensor capture – as its a longer lens there is not the distortion effect you obtain from a wide angle lens.

Actor 60mm f4 Lens

Again you need to find the infinity of the lens but this is easier to achieve as its a longer lens. We will be covering this soon, a short video will explain the process.

For this test we used the following; Cambo Actus Mini View Camera, Sony A7R, Actar 60mm lens, Standard bellows, CBH-6 ball and socket head and Manfrotto 055 CF tripod.

Using the Sony to meter the exposure at ISO50 was 1.0 sec at F16. The RAW file was captured with the generic Sony profile and a 2 second self timer was used to avoid camera shake.

As already mentioned the lens image circle is quite large, 75mm, so can be shifted horizontally 19mm left and 19mm right. For this test we shifted 10mm left and 10mm right. Again we chose not to use the rise and fall as the ground and sky wasn’t very appealing.

Once the RAW files were captured we imported the files into Capture One Sony Express and processed them using the Sony Generic profile, 16Bit and saved as a TIFF file to preserve the data. Capture One pre-set sharpening was used, as shown below, there was no need to increase this.

The only real change was the warmer natural light, so we enhanced the contrast to keep as much detail in the image. I prefer the warm light, its much more pleasing to the eye.

The Photoshop layered file to be stitched is 929.8MB layered file, 322MB (flattened.) The TIFF file is 1.24GB. The pixel dimension of the capture is 11456 x 4912 at 300dpi / Print output 38.18” x 16.37” 300dpi.

The Photoshop CC2015 auto merge, content aware and edge fill process was the same as when we processed the Actar 24mm files.

The images we use for the blog are 1080 wide at 72dpi, reduced to manage on the blog. The cropped imaged was taken from the middle of the panorama at 100% (approx.) zoom. The file is 8.8MB, 1893 x 812 at 300 dpi with a print output of 6.31” x 2.7” at 300dpi. I have been too generous with the crop produced by the Actar 24mm as the size of these files should be the same.

The Actar 60mm is a better lens for this type of work. Of course longer lenses will suffer less with distortion and lens aberrations, we are also cropping into the image area which is far more effective when shooting a panoramic image.

There is more to come – we can’t say too much just now, so please Sign up and don’t miss a post. For further information about Cambo products contact your nearest dealer– Dealer Search.