Do not look at the individual photographs on your LCD screen until you finish shooting. Make sure you have at least 20% overlapping areas in two consecutive photographs. When you are ready, start shooting from left to right. Be sure to do a mock round without actually shooting. This will help you in keeping a control of the number of shots rather than shooting randomly. Stand at the selected spot and plan the number of shots in advance. You would not want to see the same object twice across the panorama. If you are not shooting fast enough, you will find moving objects (e.g., people, cars, bikes) will be duplicated across the frames. Additionally if you are shooting a cityscape, a populated beach or a scenario where there is movement, be cautious. This will help in achieving a greater image height which can be cropped out as per requirement, say for printing or aesthetics.īe very quick in shooting since light conditions change fast. To overcome this issue you may choose to shoot the panorama in Portrait (Vertical) mode. This will further reduce the height of the panorama. Additionally, during the stitching process there will be a lot of redundant or blank areas (you will see later during the post-processing) which need to be cropped out. Shooting in Landscape is fine but the resulting panorama will be short in height, since Landscape photographs will be stitched together. We are generally accustomed to shoot in Landscape (horizontal) mode. A steady posture, or using your camera bag or any sturdy object available to rest the camera on, will save you the weight of carrying a tripod. However on a bright day you can very well rely on your own hands. If the weight of your tripod is not a factor, carrying it is always preferable. A word of caution – as we will be shooting in JPEG make sure the exposure values are correctly adjusted. Shooting in RAW is absolutely fine, but since the photographs will not be edited individually (we will see this at a later stage) and to reduce shutter lag, shooting in JPEG is preferred. While you generally want to shoot in RAW, it is preferable to switch to JPEG for panoramas. Shooting in Automatic, Program or Semi-Automatic modes (like Shutter priority or Aperture priority) will result in different exposure values for each photograph, which in turn may cause the final merged photograph to have varied exposure and color casts in different parts of the photograph. This will ensure all the photographs shot have an exact exposure value and focus throughout all the images. Since a panorama is shot over a large field of view where lighting conditions can be different, it is imperative to shoot in Manual mode with Manual Focus. Here is a list of guiding factors for creating your own panorama. The overlapping is required as the software is able to understand the common areas in two adjacent photographs and hence can eliminate duplication of a scene by stitching the same into a single photograph.īefore shooting a panorama, you need to plan out well. These two, or more, overlapping photographs are “stitched” with the help of software to produce extremely elongated fields of view. How to shoot a panoramaĪ panorama is a combined set of individual photographs, in which two adjacent photographs have at least 20% overlapping areas. Shooting your own panorama gives you the creative freedom and a sense of satisfaction. Yes, with certain cameras and Smartphones you can get Apps for recording a panorama in a sweep but I never found the results quite satisfactory. All you need is a camera, preferably one capable of shooting in Manual mode. But, to my surprise I found that panoramic photographs can be made with any kind of camera at your disposal. That photograph had a huge impact on me and it led me to searching for ways and means to photograph panoramic images.ĭuring my initial search I figured panoramas were probably made with highly specialized cameras and lenses. I had my first encounter with a panoramic image of the Himalayan mountain range being displayed at Das Studios in Darjeeling, a Himalayan resort town in West Bengal, India. If you wonder how such elongated photographs are made, you are not alone. They seem quite impossible to have been photographed with a standard camera. While visiting an art gallery or a photography exhibition, at times you may have noticed certain landscape photographs have extremely elongated fields of view.
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