Setting up the camera

Capturing the images for a 360x180 panorama part 2

In this series of web pages, I have documented the process which I currently use to create 360x180 degree panoramas. This page details how to set up the camera. The previous page deals with the use of a tripod and the next page deals with taking the photos.

Setting up the camera

Do you need to use a fancy camera?

My camera is a bottom of the range SLR and my "fish-eye" lens is the cheapest manual lens that I could buy, that wasn't a screw-on adapter. I know some people use compact cameras and others use more expensive SLR cameras. I feel that my camera is a good compromise and I have had very little success with my (admittedly very cheap) compact cameras and also less success with a more expensive borrowed Canon 550D. So why am I happy with my camera for taking panoramas?

• My camera produces reasonably detailed images, with relatively predictable distortion, in which Hugin generally finds enough detail to be able to automatically stitch the images.
• The image files from my camera are relatively small for an SLR. When I borrow the 18 mega-pixel Canon 550D, my 3 giga bytes of RAM Windows 7 laptop does not have enough memory to stitch the images and I have to switch to Hugin in Ubuntu Linux (dual boot on the same laptop), which does work for me.
• My camera enables me to fix the focus, shutter speed, aperture and white-balance during image capture. If these were allowed to vary whilst shooting the panorama, the colours, exposure and focus of the images would also vary, leading to a poor stitch.
• My camera enables me to take raw photos, which retain much of the original exposure information, so I can process the photos later and adjust the exposure, or I can read the raw images into Luminance HDR to perform tonemapping. Canon Digital Photo Professional is also a great program for processing raw files, if somewhat slow and it comes free with Canon SLR cameras.

So, in summary, the Canon 1000D works well for me and I am happy with it for this application, although I would love to have a higher specification camera and more expensive glass for some of the other photographic activities that I have on the go! It may be that the ability to take good, high ISO images in low light on the Canon 550D may push me towards that camera for indoor panoramas.

How to set the exposure

All but three of the successful 360x180 panoramas that I have taken have been out of doors. I have not been completely happy with my results indoors, although I suspect I know how to improve my indoor panoramas and will update this post when I have perfected my technique.

So, for outdoor panoramas, I generally set the camera up like this:

• Manual mode.
• Turn off automatic white balance (AWB). Generally I use the cloudy setting.
• Focus the lens to infinity (it has no auto-focus, but if it did, I would turn Autofocus and Image Stabilisation off).
• Set the aperture to f22, or as close to that as possible, to give maximum possible depth of field and increase sharpness throughout the photograph.
• Adjust the shutter speed and ISO settings to give normal exposure (shown on the internal light meter) for an "average" part of the scene. Long shutter speeds increase the risk of wobble creating blurred images, especially in the hand-held nadir shot. High ISO numbers create more grainy photographs. For my first indoor panoramas, I made the mistake of using a wide aperture, a high ISO and a closer focus distance. Although the images were usable, they were really too grainy and out of focus in the distance. The long shutter speeds needed for high f-stop numbers indoors mean that any people in the pictures need to stay very still and capturing a good nadir shot becomes difficult.
• Because the shutter can be open for longer than 1/50th of a second, I often use a cable release, as this minimises the movement of the camera as the shot is taken, especially as my tripod and panoramic mount can sometimes wobble.
• If I am not sure that I have got my exposure right, I set the camera to take three bracketed images at two-stop intervals. This enables me to either produce separate HDR images before stitching or to pick which series of photos is best exposed.

How to position the camera

Through trial and error, I have discovered a number of rules for positioning the camera.

• Shoot in portrait orientation. This enables me to take one horizontal row of photographs, with just one photograph above and one or two nadir photographs below horizontal.
• Start pointing north. Because 360cities.net want panoramas to be orientated according to compass directions, I try to start shooting with the camera pointing north and sometimes line up the camera with a pocket compass. This is just to make the process of orientating the final panorama easier after stitching.
• Leave room to move. The tripod needs to be somewhere with enough room to rotate the camera and move around the tripod, keeping out of the photographs. I have felt uncomfortably close to the edge when photographing on top of some large boulders on the beach.
• Watch out for photographic clutter. I have bought myself a large camera bag, a LowePro Fastpack 350, which enables me to pack away all of my camera kit, waterproofs and fleece whilst I take the panorama, leaving nothing in the view of the camera. The folded tripod head and my notebook (not a computer) fit in the laptop compartment, but the one massive irritation is the lack of straps for a tripod on this bag, which are present on the more expensive models. If I have a friend with me, I get them to take the tripod away from me as I remove the camera from the tripod to take the second nadir shot, so I can stay in place, whilst moving the tripod out of the shot.
• Be aware of the camera shadow. The shadow from the tripod can be removed using an image editor using the hand-held nadir image. The shadow from the camera will always be in the same place in the image set, as the camera stays in roughly the same place throughout shooting and the shadow will need to be cloned out of the final image. If possible, place the tripod in such a place that the camera itself does not cast a shadow, or it casts a shadow onto something that is easy to clone with an image editor.
• Be aware of your shadow. As I rotate the tripod, I think about where my shadow is falling and try to minimise the size of the shadow by crouching. I also vary where my shadow appears in the shots, so I can edit them out later by choosing to use part of a photograph in which there is no shadow.
• Be aware of reflections. If there are windows or other reflective surfaces nearby, I try to avoid appearing in them to save myself work cutting my reflection out later.
• Be aware of your feet. I try to vary where I stand for the two nadir shots.

As I have become more comfortable with the mechanics of taking the shots, I have begun to think a bit more about composition, but I am still a novice and gain a great deal by looking at some of the excellent examples of panoramas and panospheres on Flickr.

The previous page deals with the use of a tripod and the next page deals with taking the photos.