tenny52 wrote:
I have 24mm & 50mm primes and 20-35 & 24-70 Zooms.
Which one do you think should yield better result for landscape?
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!)