Panoramic Shots

When you can’t fit a subject into a single frame, consider capturing it in a series of pictures and then using your computer to join the images into a panoramic photo. Panoramic shots are not only landscapes (horizontal) but can also be vertical shots, like architectural and sculptural elements Whether you want to record a natural wonder, a towering cityscape, or just your own street, this topic shows you how.

Setting Up for Panoramic Photography
The panorama creation process involves photographing the first segment of the scene, rotating the camera to shoot the next segment, and rotating again until you’ve captured each area that you want to include in the panorama. Then you open the images in a photo editing program on your computer and stitching them together. For the software to create a seamless panorama, however, you must be careful about how you take each picture.

Use a tripod and manual exposure when capturing frames to use in a panorama, and allow at least 15 percent overlap on each side for proper alignment.

Rotating Around the Nodal Point
When you rotate the camera between shots, the axis of rotation is critical. You must rotate the camera with respect to the optical center of the lens, called the nodal point. Otherwise, you get large shifts in perspective from one shot to the next, which results in alignment errors that are difficult or impossible to remove in the stitching process.

If you put the camera on a standard tripod head, the axis of rotation will be several inches away from the nodal point. The same problem occurs when you hold the camera and rotate your body to take each shot.

Special panoramic tripod heads enable you to position the camera so that it rotates around the lens nodal point.

If a panoramic head isn’t in your budget, try this technique to make sure that you rotate the camera around the lens nodal point. Find a flat, stable surface on which you can place the camera while shooting your panoramic series. Place a coin on the surface to mark the axis of rotation you want to use. For each shot, reposition the camera so that the lens nodal point is always on top of the coin.

When you want to use a tripod, put the coin or other marker on the ground. Before each shot, move the tripod as necessary to keep the lens nodal point directly over the marker. You can also use a string that has a weight at the end to help in this positioning. You tie the unweighted end of the string around the lens barrel and let the weighted end dangle down to the nodal-point marker.

Shooting the Pieces of Your Panorama
In addition to rotating your camera with respect to the lens nodal point, shooting good panoramic images involves several other important considerations.

Shoot in Vertical Orientation - When you stitch together your images, the stitching software probably will shift some of the images up or down to achieve a good seam. This results in ragged edges at the top and the bottom of the panorama, which you then have to crop away. If you shoot your panoramic images with the camera in a vertical orientation, rather than in normal horizontal orientation, your final panorama image will have more height than if you started with horizontally oriented images.

Overlap Each Shot - Each shot should overlap the previous one in the series. The overlap gives the stitching software the data it needs to glue the images together. For best results, keep the camera level to the horizon line. Check your camera manual to find out whether the camera can display a grid to help you align shots.

Take Control of Exposure - Working in autoexposure mode can cause problems unless the lighting is even throughout the scene. Shooting panoramas in automatic exposure mode may create shifts in focus between frames as well as lighting breaks. The best solution is to work in manual exposure mode, basing the exposure on the average lighting conditions throughout the panoramic view.

Stitching Your Panorama
Because panoramic imaging has become popular among digital photography enthusiasts, many photo editing programs offer a basic panorama-building tool. One such example is the Adobe Photoshop panorama utility, which goes by the name of Photomerge.