I am still looking for the ideal 35mm lens for canon… I am a big fan of (old) manual lenses, since they offer many advantages for high resolution panorama photography, mainly they are tiny and light, and usually really sharp, and they don’t shift focus or zoom based on orientation.

My biggest problem are sodium-pressure street lights, the worst light source ever invented by men. They will simply produce the mostly horrid lens flares you can imagine, and I am still looking for a lens that handles them in a graceful, controllable and manageable way (or in my case, can I remove the flares with enough overlapping shots and some alpha masks or with other masking techniques).

Below are some results from different lenses, most of them are not ideal yet… so far, the Olympus 24mm has produced the best results, but I need a bit longer lens for my purposes, namely a 35mm…

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This is just a small script modification, allowing you to delete all masks without applying them. Very helpful if you are working on a panorama from ptgui with blended and layers output. Simply unzip and drop in your photoshop:presets:scripts folder.

Download DeleteAllMasks.jsx.zip

I do bracket all my night photography, for various reasons: for exposure blending, noise reduction, dynamic range extension etc etc. Unfortunately, Canon thinks that all photographers only need +-2EV brackets, unless you own one of the very big Canons, and that 30 seconds is also enough. Unfortunately, it isn’t enough for some of my night panoramas, and I was looking into ways to fix it (that included pleading to Canon, but we all know how far that goes).

So I decided to build my own long-exposure bracket controller, based on the arduino platform, with an Nokia LCD to actually have an user interface, other than a red button, write my own piece of software and test it last night… I call the gadget “Bracketmeister 0.32″ for now. It works like a charm. Now I can have +-3EV (what I was aiming for, but the it does up to +-10EV, possibly more), exposures from 1 sec to 2 hours, and up to 11 shots for each bracket set (can be more). Now no night panorama is impossible anymore.

Update: More info, diagram, images and source code after the break:
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