Taking Panoramic photos part 1

I want to start this post by saying that even your Grandmother can stitch a panoramic photo with the advances of technology. With that out of the way let’s get you started. A few years back we only had photoshop to manually blend images into panoramic shots. Eventually photoshop incorporated a feature that did all the work for you but the results were abysmal at best! Nowadays their stitching software seems to work much better but while they were trying to make a decent offering other companies jumped up all over with some really good alternatives. The best software I have ever used is Auto Pano Pro (In the next post we will look at how to use this software). Creating a Panoramic photo couldn’t be any simpler!

To start off we need some photos that we took with the intention of making a Panorama. This process doesn’t need to be too complicated but you need to know how to operate your camera. First we need to take a photo of something that will actually be in our final image. We do this to check that we have the correct exposure. Now you can use exposure lock or just set your camera to Manual and choose the correct exposure yourself. We do this because we don’t want colors and exposure to be all over the place in our final set of images. Setting the white Balance is a must if you are shooting JPG. If you are shooting RAW we can change this when we convert our files.

Now that we know the basic camera settings we need to capture our scene. Because we are taking a panorama you need to make sure we can get the maximum amount of detail from our photos. To do that we are going turn our cameras and shoot vertically because of the 3:2 ratio in SLR cameras. If you are shooting with a point and shoot you must still do this even if your ratio is only 4:3. That will get us more pixels to work with in our final image.

We are now almost ready to shoot our panorama. Two last things to note. If you are shooting with a SLR choose a place to focus on and switch your lens to manual focus. This way we are sure to have the same focus point on all our photos. If you are using a point and shoot this probably won’t matter that much because of the increased amount of depth of field. When taking the images make sure you have a 20% overlap between each frame. This overlap makes it easier for the software to stitch your images.

In the next post we will look at how to stitch our images into a Panorama. Stay tuned!