Panorama

What is a panoramic photo?

A panoramic photo is the assembly of several photos together to obtain a photo that is often larger than what can be obtained with a lens and with a different aspect ratio. Most cameras will give a 1:2 or 4:3 ratio photo.

Settings

Simply set :

• The focal length you are going to use

• The width of the panorama in degrees (max. 360°) or if you prefer, you can enter the size in pixels

• The height of the panorama in degrees (max 180°) or if you prefer, you can enter the size in pixels

• The percentage of overlap of the photos (for post-processing assembly)

You will get the number of photos to be taken in height and width as well as the offset in degrees for the centre of each photo.

Panorama center = 0°

Offset 1 = -65.6°

Offset 2 = Offset 3 = Offset 4 = 43.7°

The equipment

Your camera should be disengageable: it should allow you to access the settings manually and abandon the automatic mode. Some cameras have scene modes called panning which certainly work well. But the point here is to do it yourself and honestly, there is more fun in learning to do it by hand than letting the camera do it all.

The reason why manual mode is essential is that all the images that will make up your panorama must be exposed identically. The same applies to white balance. You will need to keep control of the exposure and white balance and not change anything in the successive shots.

How to set the right exposure?

Start by taking an average light measurement over the entire area to be photographed.

But how to measure the light on the panorama? It's this way:

1. Set your camera to aperture priority.

2. Choose a landscape aperture like f/8 or f/11, and don't change it anymore.

3. Find an area of the horizon with average brightness (hint: it's neither the darkest nor the lightest part)

4. Take a picture of this area.

5. Look at the histogram displayed by the SLR (it should be well balanced)

If the other areas of the landscape are not too dark or bright, keep your settings. On the other hand, if the luminosity is too extreme, you can make an exposure correction in order to find a histogram identical to that of the first photo.

How to adjust the white balance?

White balance is what gives the colour tone to the image (also called colour temperature).

Turn off the automatic white balance and choose one that matches the sunlight situation. As you will always be outdoors it will usually be "sun" or "cloud".

If you are working in RAW, you don't need to do anything, as you can set the same white balance for all the images during development.

Shooting

The tripod on which the camera is mounted must be level.

The application makes you start from the left, but you can start from the right by changing the sign for the starting angle. Once positioned for the first photo of a line (offset by -65.6° from the centre in the example), shoot and rotate the SLR to the right by the angle indicated (43.7° in the example). Do the same for each line of the panorama.

Assembling the photos

You will need software (because doing it by hand will be no fun at all this time). There are a lot of free (Microsoft ICE for example) to paid (Photoshop for example).