Panoramic Photos
The panoramic photos are made by placing side by side several photos. To get a good result it’s very important to use some tricks by shooting the base which is the main subject of the tutorial you are reading.
Practical advice before starting to shoot: If your machine has the ability to store images to a different folder on the card for the panoramas do it, or take a photo of a futile object (eg. Knapsack) before the first photo and after the last picture. It will be easier to identify the group of pictures when you want to download and catalog.
Let’s start from the support. The best solution is to surely having a panoramic tripod head. Because of it’s high costs you can fallback to a tripod with a traditional ball head or three-dimensional head (three movements). Photos should be taken keeping the camera aligned as much as' possible between steps and trying to minimize the axis variations. The most common situation is that you did not bring your tripod with you and in this case I suggest you to refer to the tutorial “Shooting without tripodâ€.
Next into the preliminary settings. On your camera reset any preset styles and work with the most neutral profile you have. Select mode "aperture priority" and work with a rather closed aperture (F12-F16), point the camera toward the center of the panorama that you have, focus and note the time that the exposure meter offers. Switch from autofocus to manual focus. Set the machine in "manual" mode and set the same aperture and the same time that you recorded earlier. Point again the central area and block the exposure so that it remains fixed for the next photos. With these steps we have set the machine so that it behaves identically in the same way for each of the shots preventing focus changes, exposure or aperture. We’re now ready to start shooting!
Usually you’re advised to take pictures with horizontal camera but in my opinion the best results are achieved by holding the camera vertically because it minimizes the presence of dark vertical stripes between photos during assembly phase. The vertical shoot lets you overlay the long side of the picture and minimizes the vignetting problems that are common to all lenses. You still get darker strips overlapped but they will be horizontal and not vertical and are easier to handle and hide during the blending process or in post-production. Last but not least, shooting pictures with vertical camera gives a more balanced output images thanks to the increased vertical field view.
The shots can be made from left to right or vice versa but trying to keep overlapping the area of about 20% between images. After taking the stream of sequential photos also take some additional photos in the center area more above and then more below the middle line of the previous photos. The reason is that it often happens that the crop, after the assembly phase, obliges us to cut some important details in the central area.
If possible avoid any objects or people in the scene that can move in different positions between the clicks, (they were all together in the final photo)non ho capito.
Now you're ready for the final step: connecting the images! You need a good software that offers you the opportunity to manually interact or not at various stages of the project there are:
- control points recognition between the pairs of pictures
- individual photo morphing to match the global field of view
- image merging
- final image blending to "soften" the overlapping areas and to obtain a homogeneous result without noticeable transitions
There are several softwares that you can use for composing panoramic images, I suggest the following:
- Hugin (freeware software in constant development)
- Panorama Factory (commercial software very intuitive and almost automatic)
- PTGui (commercial software with powerful support for RAW files and ability to manually interact at all stages of the project)
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Have a nice panorama composition!
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