Shooting a Panorama

A panorama is not difficult to shoot. Many current cameras have built in assistance for doing them and several allow you to point your camera at one end of your panorama, press the shutter button, and sweep across the scene until you reach the other end, stop and wait a few seconds and your panorama is complete. Heck my phone does that. OK, my phone does a pretty poor job of doing that. You might substitute another word for pretty if your not blogging.

Here I'll describe doing it the old-fashioned way, like we did it way back in 2008. You might have noticed in a post a few days back that it's not a new idea. The shot here was from about 1976 and if your familial with Salisbury Maryland this is the back of downtown and a parking garage in the right side of the photo has not yet been built. Technology wise this is an amalgam; the shots were done on black & white Tri-X film and were, just a few years back, scanned into digital files and stored on my computer. I found them recently and told Photoshop CS6 to create a panorama for me and voila a panorama.

Most panoramas today begin life as digital images and what follows will assume you have either a DSLR or another digital camera that you can control manually. As I mentioned in an earlier post the reason manual control is needed for panorama photos is that they are made of several separate photos and when assembled as you see here they should appear as a single image. A single image has a single exposure, a single white balance, and a single point of focus. If you use your camera in a automatic mode all three of those things may change with each shot. Now that I've said that I'll say that if you took your photos in a automatic mode today's panorama creating software may very well do a great job of putting them together, but here on Jim's Photo Stuff we are going to be more careful so we'll use the Manual Mode.

Step one, of course, is to choose what you are going to shoot. The method we will be describing will work best if there is nothing very close to the camera. If you want that kind of shot we'll discuss some more techniques down near the bottom of the post.

I have gotten very good results creating panoramas with my camera hand held, but I do recommend a tripod if one is available. If I am shooting hand held I face the end of my panorama and line up the camera for the last image, then I twist my body until I can line up my first shot. Now I take the first shot and slightly untwist to prepare for the second shot. You will want the shots to overlap by about 1/3 so there will be plenty of area for the software to create a good alignment. Untwist some more, take the next shot and so on until you take the last shot. It is important to keep the camera level for each shot. Pointing down or up will create a curved image which doesn't usually look as creative as it sounds.

If you are using a tripod, level your camera and turn it left and right deciding where the image will start and where it will stop. In the hand held description I did not mention exposure, white balance, and focus, but I will cover them here and you will use the same procedure whichever method you choose.

Set your camera in the Manual Mode and look at the panorama you've planned. Do you see a brighter area and do you see a darker area. You are looking for an area that is in between, not the darkest and not the lightest. Set your exposure for that area. Be sure your focus is in manual mode and focus on a point roughly 1/3 of the way into the shot. Take your white balance off automatic and set it to the current conditions such as daylight or cloudy. Now take all the images you planned being sure to over lap them by about 1/3.

If you would like to include items that are relatively close to the camera pay attention here. The image to the right shows the type of path your camera will follow if you hold it in your hand and twist your body as I described above.


In the second image you will see how your camera will move if the panning is done on a tripod with the camera attached the way cameras are usually attached. The camera pivots around the point on the camera body where the tripod screw attaches.

Now for the optical purists and the people trying to include items near the camera and far away lets look at the third image. You will need to purchase or "home brew" a panoramic head for your tripod. A panoramic head allows the camera to slide backward so that the point of rotation is not under the camera body but under the lens and specifically under what is called the nodal point of the lens. A search for panoramic heads or panoramic heads diy should provide you with enough information to spin you head as well as your camera, but if the regular tripod method is not giving you correctly aligned images this may be your answer.

You're not done of course you now have the shots but no panoramic image. Upload your panorama pieces to your computer in the usual way. Now since my typing fingers have exceeded today's mileage allotment we'll be back soon with what to do now.

Thanks for reading.
Jim King