How To Shoot Panoramas

Gear:

• DSLR
• Standard zoom
• Tripod – not essential but will help keep your shots steady and in line

Technique:

Location

Choose your location carefully as if you have elements close to the front of the shot they won't stitch together properly. If you want to shoot a scene that has lots of foreground interest you'll need to use a dedicated panorama head. Take a look at our tutorial on shooting panoramas with a head if you want more information on how to do this.

Go Manual

To ensure consistency from frame to frame, manually set your exposure, white balance and focus. Getting the exposure right can be tricky but if you take a few test shots, one in the centre of your shot and two at either edge and tweak the exposure as you go until it works for all three parts of the image, you'll soon have a good amount of detail in the shadows and highlights.

It's also very important that you don't adjust your focus between shots so once you've got your image sharp, don't touch the lens barrel.

Taking the shot

You can shoot horizontally or upright, however you need to leave some space to crop into just in case and shooting upright will mean you don't get the letter-box effect shooting horizontally can create.

Start at either the left or right of the image, whichever you're more comfortable with, and allow for some overlap between each frame. It's always worth doing a 'dummy run' so you can make sure everything you want in the scene can be captured and to double-check you have enough overlap between each shot.

Stitching

You can use various pieces of software to stitch your shots into a panorama. Take a look at our two tutorials for Panorama Factory and Photoshop CS4.

Panorama Photo Book

When you've stitched your panoramas together display them in a Photo Book. Try placing your panoramas across two pages of an Albelli Photo Book or how about hanging a canvas from your wall?


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