Panoramic photography: Taking photos for panoramas
Panoramic photos are images with exceptionally wide fields of view, which are created by stitching multiple regular-size images together. To put it simply, such pictures give the viewer the appearance of a “panorama,” offering an unobstructed or complete view of an area. This style of photography is widely used in nature and landscapes photography, cityscapes and architecture photos and group portraits.
Traditionally a special image-editing software is used to create panoramas. However, today some digital camera manufacturers produce cameras that combine several single shots together to create one seamless image right in camera. Check the following HP cameras that sports this feature: HP Photosmart R725, R727, R827, R927 and the R967.
If you don’t have a camera that sports this feature, but you want to produce images with wide field of view, you’ll find useful the following tips on taking photos for panoramas from the best photographers on the Web.
- Equipment. It is true that you can create panoramas from the images taken with a regular point-and-shot camera and you don’t necessarily need a tripod or any other special equipment. Though, Panoguide highly recommends to use a tripod as a fixed pivot point, as all the images for panoramas have to be taken from virtually the same point of perspective.
- What works well. Nick Stevens writes what are the best scenes for panoramas – ‘Scenes with many large objects at differing distances, some sort of interesting shape on the larger scales, extreme symmetry, bridges – these all can work very nicely for panoramic photography.’
- Panoguide offers tips on Choosing the spot from which to shoot – ‘If you position the camera near to the edge of something such as a lawn, your picture can look a little odd even to people who know the location.’
- Sufficient Overlap. D Joiner recommends – ‘For best results we suggest that each pair of photos has between 25% and 50% overlap. When shooting multi-row spherical panoramas you will also have to leave vertical overlap between rows.’
- Taking photos. Nick Stevens recommends to rotate around the camera position, not to turn in a circle holding the camera, to avoid subjects being very close to the camera and use a VERY good flash or avoid it at all if yours is of low quality.
- White Balance. All the pictures for panoramas have to be taken with the same white balance as changing in it may cause subtly different colours on your panorama. D Joiner recommends to adjust white balance settings manually, as camera’s automatic white balance changes in between taking photos.
- Exposure. D Joiner suggests to set exposure manually – ‘If the range of lighting conditions within the panorama is too large for a single exposure setting you can also manually adjust the exposure between photos. The best way to do this is to make sure that the exposure doesn’t change too drastically between adjacent photos.’
- Depth of Field. Find recommendation for choosing focus Panoguide.com – ‘Avoid altering the depth of field because to do this you will need to alter focus, and when you alter focus you subtly change the field of view of your lens. Most software cannot cope with a mixture of lenses being used for a panoramic sequence - they assume the same lens was used throughout, or more specifically that the lens was used with exactly the same settings (including focus).’
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