Brenizer bike

I’ve been read­ing late­ly about the Breniz­er method (some­thing I’ve appar­ent­ly been doing already, with­out know­ing that’s what it’s called). Essen­tial­ly, you take a bunch of pho­tos of a still sub­ject, then stitch them togeth­er into one image. The result­ing panora­ma will have the depth-of-field (ie, back­ground blur) of a sin­gle pho­to tak­en with a much, much wider lens.

The image above is made up of 38 pho­tos, each tak­en using a 50mm lens, wide open at f/1.8. I stitched the pho­tos togeth­er using hug­in, an open-source panora­ma creator.

The result­ing image was 12,000×15,000 pix­els, which is huge. I shrank it down to 2000×1600 or so to upload it here.

It’s not a per­fect result: there’s a def­i­nite change in colour above and to the right of the bike, and if you zoom in you can see some ghost­ing in the han­dle­bars and body.

But the image—taken, remem­ber, with a 50mm f/1.8 lens—has an effec­tive focal length of about 16mm and an aper­ture of f/0.6. There’s… there’s no way I would afford an f/0.6 lens.

Here’s a sin­gle pho­to, tak­en from way fur­ther back, of the bike. Ignore the dif­fer­ence in colour—the clouds kept com­ing and going, and I shot for sun­light instead. But look at the trees in the back­ground. They’re way less soft than the ones in the Breniz­er pho­to above.

Inter­est­ed in prints of my pho­tos? Let me know, and we can work some­thing out.