Making great panoramas is as much an art as it’s a science. Making great panorama begins with shooting the individual photos that you will later stitch together in the digital darkroom. Back in the days when film photography was the only kind of photography there was making panoramas involved special cameras and the stitching had to be done by hand. Today, in the digital age, making great panorama photos has become a snap. Well, maybe not a snap, but a great deal easier. Creating great panoramas is still an art form but it’s now an art form that almost anyone can learn.
Making great panorama photos begins with shooting the individual pictures that will compose the final panorama shot. Today’s digital darkroom software will enable the photographer to correct many of the mistakes that happen during shooting the pictures that the old time photographers had a much more difficult time correcting in the old fashioned darkroom but it’s much better to get it right the first time around. I’m what’s referred to as a proactive photographer and proactive is the approach to photography that I preach to all new photographers.
The first step in producing great panorama photos is to shoot straight and level photos. With commercial digital darkroom software like Adobe PhotoShop CS, Adobe PhotoShop Elements, Corel Paint Shop Pro X, as well as with many of the freeware and shareware digital darkroom programs, we can straightened photos that weren’t shot with the camera perfectly level. We’re proactive photographers, remember, it make producing beautiful panoramas a great deal easier if all the individual pictures were taken with a perfectly level camera. We not only want to shoot all the pictures with the camera perfectly level, we want to shoot all the individual pictures with the camera at the same height. Having the camera at the same height and having the camera level will make stitching the frames together in the digital darkroom easier, smoother, and faster. There are a couple of ways the photographer can achieve this.
The first way to achieve straight and level exposures is to use a professional tripod equipped with a pan/tilt/leveling head. These tripods and heads can be quite expensive; the one that I use is made by Gitzo and cost me close to $500. For me, it was a business investment and a tax write off but if you are a hobbyist or a freelancer just starting out you may not have those kinds of funds to invest. The second way allows you use any tripod as long as it provides a rock steady platform for your camera and allows you to make fine pan and tilt adjustment. For those of you just starting out, or for those freelancers with limited funds to invest there’s the Manfrotto 337 Hot Shoe Double Axis Bubble Level that does an adequate job and costs less than $40 at most camera stores and online. Actually, I have this little gadget in my photographer’s tool kit although I use my Gitzo in most situations. There are times when I have to use other camera mounts and when I do the Manfrotto 337 becomes indispensable. By the way, the Manfrotto 337 makes an excellent Christmas gift for any photographer on you gift list.
The second step in shooting great panorama pictures involves exposures. Exposure can become tricky, especially if you shoot in one of the programmed modes. Brightness can vary widely from one part of the scene to another and if you shoot in a programmed mode, the camera’s exposure settings will vary from one shot to another. So? Isn’t that what the camera’s supposed to do to get properly exposed pictures? Yes, it is, but when you are shooting individual pictures that will be stitched together to create a single panorama photo, we have a serious problem. The stitched together panorama will appear banded because of the differences in brightness between the different areas of the photograph. The way to be proactive here and to avoid banding is to set your camera to its "Shutter Priority Mode," select a shutter speed, and then watch the cameras recommended f-stop settings as you pan from the brightest to the darkest part of the panorama. Note these f-stop settings and then pick the f-stop number half way between the largest and the smallest. With this f-stop firmly fixed in your mind, switch our camera to full manual and set the lens f-stop appropriately. Some of your pictures will now be slightly underexposed while others will be slightly overexposed but the overall exposure will produce the best results for stitching the photos together to produce the panorama.
The third step is to watch out for parallax problems. Parallax is a problem that all cameras and lens suffer from to one degree or another. Without really getting into the physics of optics, parallax causes an optical illusion that objects nearer the camera move faster than objects further away from the camera do. This is a problem when shooting pictures for a panorama because you will capture ghost images of objects in the foreground. Although you only panned the camera a short distance between shots any objects in the foreground will appear to have moved further then the background view, which is what you’re shooting. The problem is that there isn’t any easy way to avoid this problem so be proactive and select a location to set up your camera for the panorama pictures that don’t have any objects near the camera’s lens. You can remove ghost image in PhotoShop, but to do that without any artifacts noticeable is an art form in itself, and art form that takes a lot of practice to perfect. It’s better to avoid the parallax problems if possible. Before we move on, this is a good point to tell you that when you do pan your camera between the exposure pan it from left to right and overlap each frame by at least 30 percent.
The fourth step to making great panorama shots is to watch the focal length of the lens you’re shooting with. The word brings to mind the idea "wide," so one would think that wide angle lenses is just what the doctor ordered…right? Wrong. Wide angle lenses have a tendency to warp the edges of the frame much like a "Fisheye" lens does and this will cause you all kinds of heartache when you go to stitching the individual shots together. Another commonly accepted practice when shooting panoramas is to frame the shots using the panorama aspect ratio in the viewfinder. That would seem to make sense but it’s really the wrong way to frame your shots, turn your camera on end and frame panorama shots like you would a portrait shot. Why is shooting vertically instead of horizontally better, you ask? Without getting too technical, the reason is that you tend to lose parts of the top and bottom of each photo when stitching them together in the software. Shooting vertically means you will have to take more individual pictures then if you shot them horizontally, but the end results will make the extra work all worthwhile.
The Fifth step in making great panoramas id to employ the "patched quilt" or "Grid" techniques. If you are trying to achieve great height as well as width in your panoramas, shoot the pictures in several passes. If you are making six exposures from left to right, make several passes from left to right over lapping each pass by at least 30 percent just as you overlapped each shot you make in your left to right pan. Personally, I find it easiest to make the first pan with the camera at the lowest height and then raise the camera’s height for each new pass from left to right. What this technique does is double, triple, and so on of the number of photos that the software has to stitch together.
OK, that’s the basics of shooting the pictures that you will use to make your panorama in the digital darkroom. Next time we talk about several different software programs that you can use to stitch the shots together.
