Here’s a panorama I did today of Dolores Park in San Francisco, CA. It’s late January and Dolores Park is crowded due to the beautiful weather. Check out the line at the corner of 18th and Dolores: those folks are waiting to buy ice cream!

This was taken with a GigaPan EPIC Pro motorized pano head, Canon 5D Mk II, a 70-200mm f2.8 USM IS L II lens at 200mm, and a Canon 2x extender. It is composited from ~396 21.1 megapixel shots. I use large JPEGs on these (around 6-10 MB each) instead of RAWs because there’s not much benefit in attempting to post-process that many RAWs into JPEGs on the Mac. The stitching process will likely blow away any incremental improvements I’d see in the image quality, especially considering that this was being shot at 400mm at 1/100s. This should be shot at at least 1/400s (shutter speed in x fractions of a second should be at least the focal length in millimeters). I wanted a large depth of field. I also wanted to avoid noise caused by having too high of an ISO. So this is with a high f-fstop (f20) to maximize depth of field in competition with motion blur caused by the camera’s vibrations caused by wind, etc. Perhaps a few sessions of trial and error would allow me to compare the same scene, one shot with a bias for faster shutter speeds and the other to bias lower ISOs (what I did this time)…