Making panoramic photos with your DSLR

Making panoramic photos is easy using your digital SLR. With photo stitching software, also called panorama makers, you could produce panoramic photos straight away and take home that sweeping view. Let's look at how you can start making panoramic photos.

Panoramic photos are usually done on landscape scenes. When there is no foreground interest in your subject, or when your lens is not wide enough to capture the scene, making a horizontal panorama is the most practical way to take any landscape scene. Photographers usually pick still subjects for panoramic photos to to avoid ghosting and to simplify the process of image stitching. You can also make panoramas with moving subjects, such as party or street scenes or sports events. Making panoramic photos with moving subjects requires masking out uneven elements to avoid ghosting.

QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) is composed of multi-rowed 360 degrees panoramas stitched together. Architects, Interior designers, or Real Estate agencies often use QTVRs to illustrate and provide a virtual reality experience of a hotel, showroom, office, interior of residences, shops, etc. Visit Arie P. de Ruiter’s page at World Wide Panorama for an example of QTVR. You need to have Apple’s QuickTime player installed to view QTVRs.

Taking each photo or “frame” with constant exposure is the key to get good looking panoramic photos. This means you need to set your DSLR at full manual mode. The settings mentioned below are only recommendations based on personal experience.

1. Focal length is preferably 50mm (full frame) to minimize barrel distortion.
2. Set your focus at fixed distance.
3. White balance should be constant. This is to make sure that you get constant color temperature and tint.
4. To meter the scene, pick a portion of the scene that has even lighting. Adjust the f-stop, and shutter speed, and ISO to get proper exposure. Take a photo and evaluate the histogram. Adjust the exposure if necessary.
5. Once you are happy with the exposure, remember the f-stop, shutter speed, and ISO.
   
6. Set your DSLR to Manual or M mode and apply the f-stop, shutter speed, and ISO taken from the previous step.
   
7. Select your preferred file format (JPG or RAW) RAW format is the preferred format because of its ability to rescue washed out details.
8. Filters are ok to use except Circular Polarizing (CPL) filters to get constant color saturation.
9. Shoot in portrait orientation to reduce parallax errors.
10. Shoot left to right, and overlap each frame with at least 50% per previous frame.

There are equipments such as panoramic heads for tripods. These equipments are good when making QTVRs or shooting night scenes which require slow shutter speed. Panoramic heads are usually expensive. With sufficient light to shoot, tripod and panoramic heads are not required. If you are interested, please visit Panosaurus or Nodal Ninja to learn more about their products.

Photo stitching is simple. There are lots of panorama software available. Personally I have used PTGui and Panorama Factory. They offer simple to complex options, yet lets you seamlessly create panoramic photos. Photo stitching can also be done manually using Adobe Photoshop or any other image editing software with photo stitching or photo merging features. To know more about the panorama software, please visit PTGui or Panorama Factory.

Making panoramic images are great ways to preserve breath-taking landscape scenes. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on equipments to make panoramic photos. Just follow the steps, keep practicing, and get a decent panorama software.