tenny52 Loc: San Francisco

I have 24mm & 50mm primes and 20-35 & 24-70 Zooms.
Which one do you think should yield better result for landscape?

Ourspolair

Used vertically and depending on the subject, the primes would probably be best, IMO.

Quixdraw Loc: x

With digital, costs nothing to experiment - switch and let 'er rip!

User ID

If you use properly narrow and sufficiently plentiful strips of image content, there is truly no advantage of any lens over any other. Even an ultra wide is cool, provided you stitch numerous very narrow strips.

By the same principle, if for some reason you must work with fewer, thus wider, strips of imagery, then avoid any lenses approaching ultra wide status. The 24mm should be OK. Depends on subject matter and at least 4 strips of imagery to be on the safe side.

Above assumes stitching either vertically or horizontally, but not both ways for one scene. If you are stitching on both axise, like making a quilt, then you don’t need any sort of wide lens at all. Just use your sharpest lens and stop down enough to avoid even a hint of corner shading ... likely to be your 50mm around f:11. The 24 is not a great choice for this approach.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Wider focal lengths will provide greater depth of field, which can be an advantage in landscape and real estate photography. But too wide and you have to start dealing with volume anamorphosis and wide angle perspective distortion (closer objects are rendered larger than expected, objects further away look like they are in the next county) and barrel distortion. Some very wide lenses have complex or "mustache" distortion which can be corrected but only with a lens profile. Longer lenses are great because they are usually free of most distortions.

Use the aperture that gives you the depth of field you need while providing sharp images. Most lenses from 28mm to 90mm are best between F5.6 and F11, but depending on your camera you might start to see softness due to diffraction. Telephotos will have shallow depth of field, which can provide some nice subject isolation if that is present in your composition. I would avoid anything wider, unless you have a perspective control lens which typically has better corrections than your average wide lens.

As quixdraw suggests, take them all with you on your next outing and test to see what works best for you.

billnikon Loc: Pennsylvania/Ohio/Florida/Maui/Oregon/Vermont

I generally use a wide angle for stitching. A 24 or 28 should be fine for landscape stitching.

BboH Loc: s of 2/21, Ellicott City, MD

I choose whatever lens and, if a zoom, whatever mm will give me my best image. I then shoot however many images I want to make up the scene I want to capture.

Bultaco Loc: Aiken, SC

Blair Shaw Jr Loc: Dunnellon,Florida

Go with the Sharpest Lens you have and make your tests and go from there. Primes tend to be sharper than zooms and wide angles have distortion issues. You are the master of your disaster. Good Luck.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

I also think your best bets are the prime lenses. Zooms typically have more distortion, which can cause issues when you try to stitch images together. It's not uncommon for a zoom to have pincushion distortion at one end of the focal length range and barrel distortion at the other end.

With older lenses, I'd have said the 50mm your best bet... likely the lens with the least distortion. However, today 24mm can be quite good, too.

Plus, the camera format you are using makes a difference. If you're using a crop sensor camera, 24mm is only very slightly wide and 50mm is a short telephoto.... the 24mm would probably be the best choice, so long as it's pretty well corrected and doesn't show a lot of distortion on the crop camera. On the other hand, if you're using a full frame camera, the 50mm might be the better choice. But, again, it's really hard to say.... I've got a 24mm Tilt Shift lens that I've occasionally used on a full frame camera for stitched images. Usually just two or three shots with a lot of overlap.

It also depends upon how many images you'll be stitching together. There is some inherent "exaggeration" with a wide lens, which causes close images to look large in proportion to more distant objects.

Both the images below were rather spur of the moment panoramas done with zoom lenses.

The first image below is made up from three shots done with an extreme wide angle (around 15mm if I recall correctly) on an APS-C crop sensor camera. This shows some of that wide angle exaggeration...



The "bushes" in the lower right and left corners of the above image were actually a hedge running straight across in front of me. I was standing on top of a picnic table, which itself is in area raised 6 or 8 feet above the parking lot level, so the camera was tilted "downward". I panned from right to left, to insure the gated arena entrance was included in the image. (The biggest problem doing this composite was someone walking across the same direction I was panning, who showed up three time in the initial composite image! I retouched two of them out.)

Compare to the image below, which is made up of more than 25 shots done with a 24-70mm zoom (I think at around 24mm) on an APS-C crop sensor camera. Of course, there is some distortion in this image, too (the railing of the arena doesn't curve the way it appears to). But it's not as strong as in first image. That's because I was using a less wide lens and most of the subjects were around the same distance from me. I also was shooting from approx. the same level as the horses and riders, so the camera was hand held pretty level, not tipped upward or downward, as I panned from left to right. (Even with 25-30 shots, I still only got about half the gymkhana participants and their horses in this pano. There just wasn't time to set up the shot, or ask everyone to suck it up and move closer together!)

Fotoartist Loc: Detroit, Michigan

Short telephotos make the easiest to stitch panoramas. For you that would be 70mm.

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

I would lean towards the 50mm and the 24~70 but towards the 70mm side. This avoids the tendency of wide-angle lenses to distort a bit towards the edges. Position the camera to shoot in portrait configuration and rotate the camera around the lens' nodal point.
--Bob

Sinewsworn Loc: Port Orchard, WA

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

Whichever have the least distortion...

bwa

BlackRipleyDog

58mm f 1.4 manual focus Voigtlander for Nikon. Low element glass count. Crystal clear. Closest to normal vision field-of-view as you won't have to contend with edge-to-edge distortion from a wide-angle at your overlaps.
A prime so you won't zoom-shift in while panning through your shots. The focus ring has just enough tension built-in so as to not be sloppy making micro-adjustments. Works great in both portrait and landscape orientations.

Example - Sunrise from Cadillac Mtn / Acadia National Park - 5 frames with this lens on a D800. Merged in Photoshop.

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