Digital Photography Techniques for Begining & Intermediate Photographers

Making Impressive High Detail Digital Panoramas.

This article is a panorama photography how to using specific techniques. Panorama photography has become very popular within the last 10-years.When I first started doing panoramas, you needed a tripod and a complicated setup to shoot the images required for a stitching program to work.If the images had nodel errors, the stitching software would either outright fail, or produce weird results.

With continual improvements in stitching software, taking the images required to make up a pan, and getting excellent stitching results is now much easier. There are many software stitching programs available, but not many that can yield really excellent results. After much experimenting with other programs, I determined that PtGui is the most versatile, and gives outstanding results. PtGui is easy to configure and use. The program is highly automated and finds image stitching points automatically. The cost of the program has increased over when I first purchased it, but it has so many more nice improvements. Adobe Photoshop CS4 is supposed to do automatic stitching also. I have not tried Photoshop CS4.

Though most digital cameras will yield excellent results, it is the lens that makes all the difference. Point and shoot digitals sometimes don't have a powerful enough wide angle lens, thus cameras with interchangeable lenses are much more versatile for doing panorama photography. It is possible however to get good results with almost any lens by taking more shots and stitching both vertically and horizontally into a high megapixel image.

Should you use a tripod, is a good question. A tripod requires you to make adjustments, turn knobs, and is not conducive to creative work, and is usually a hindrance to creativity. I have not found that a tripod is necessary for Landscapes unless you are including close up foregrounds in the scene, in which case you may need to make nodal adjustments for the lens in use.
Some very impressive panoramas can be done with a digital camera and a quality wide angle lens.

Panorama Photography Tutorial
Most all panorama photography tutorials will not show you what you really want to know to make professional looking images, For my PDF tutorial I will be using a Canon 5D digital camera and a Tamron wide angle lens. This tutorial can be downloaded along with the tutorial images from my Squidoo blog. For those of you who don't know, Tamron produces very high quality Canon compatible EOS lenses. The Tamron 17-35mm wide angle zoom lens produces quality images at a reasonable cost. This is my lens of choice in making panorama images. So much for panorama photography equipment, lets get into how we can make some pictures.

Panorama Photography Equipment
Panorama photography techniques vary depending on the photographer. The technique I use will not need a Tri-pod. Further more, time consuming precise setups and lens nodal adjustments are not needed to produce great results. First and foremost is to locate a scene to photograph. Look left to right and frame the scene in your minds eye before switching on your camera. For example are there unsightly telephone poles and wires in the scene? Can you change your position and eliminate these? Sometimes all it takes is a slight change in your position to make a 100% improvement. So you need to analyze and not be in a rush to snap pictures. I use a 3-inch by 12-inch viewfinder cut out of black mat board. Using a viewfinder will greatly facilitate in composing pictures. Hold your viewfinder up at arms length away from your eyes and look at your scene. This distance will approximate what a wide angle lens will view. Now that you have your pan scene composed, turn on your camera and set up for "Aperture Priority" Set your aperture to 11. Set your ISO high enough so that when you meter the scene the reported "Shutter Speed" is at least 1/125 second. Most SLR cameras will have these features. For "Point and Shoot" cameras, you may not have these features, in that case you can just use automatic mode and let the camera determine the exposure, however you must have a very firm hand when taking the pictures with a point & shoot camera.

Did you Know that an SLR camera will have all the features for making pans.

With your camera all setup, hold the camera vertically and start with the leftmost image of your pan scene in your viewfinder. Now holding the camera very still, with your arms locked in place, snap a picture. Move the camera to the right to frame the next scene but, MAKE SURE TO LEAVE AN OVERLAP between the images in your viewfinder and snap image number 2. Note make sure you do not change the vertical position when holding the camera as you pan through and take your images. So to re-iterate. Hold your camera vertically, Take all of your shots with an overlap in the images, Do not move your camera vertically only horizontally. and hold your camera with a steady hand, do not move when you snap the pictures. An urgent note. You must take a horizontal row of images with with the camera in the same vertical position as when you took the first image. If the camera vertical position is changed during the shots, the stitching software may not be able to align and stitch the images. Now change the vertical position of the camera for the next horizontal row, either up or down, and take another row of images. Continue this until you have all of the images you want for your pan. If your camera has a manual focus mode, it is best to focus manually on your leftmost image before shooting the sequence. Auto focus can cause slightly different focus points to occur between scenes. When you shoot your sequence of pictures, rotate your body from the waist up without moving your feet.

Panorama Photography Software
With all of the shots taken of your pan scene, you can import them into your computer. I suggest making a file folder with the name and date of your images. Now import your images from your file folder into your favorite Pan stitching software application and stitch your pan. The software I use is PtGui which you can find and download on the internet. Happy pan making.

Copyright 2009 G.B. Garagnon
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