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Panoramas: Getting The Big Picture

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Stunning panoramas are within your grasp with this step-by-step process


Text And Photography By David Skenick And Brian Valente

This Article Features Photo Zoom

panoramas
What is a panorama, and why would you create one? Although panos have been around for a long time, advances in tripod heads and software have made creating excellent panoramas much easier. How do you know when you have a panoramic opportunity? If you’re looking at a scene, scanning back and forth for that perfect shot, and everything else seems good—it may be a candidate for a panorama image. You know the shot is there, you just can’t single it out.

Panorama photography gives us a new canvas on which to create our photos. As photographers, we’re stuck with the traditional, constrained shapes that our cameras provide. For example, 35mm translates to a 5x7.5-inch print. A panorama, however, could be five inches tall but 30 inches long.

The only sure thing about the size and shape of a panorama is that it’s going to be long and rectangular, or tall and narrow. How long? It’s up to you. There’s no right answer to how many shots should make up your panorama image. We’ve shot anywhere from two to 16 separate images for a single panoramic image. It’s up to you to decide how wide an area you want to document. Size and shape can help you make a distinctive statement.

panoramas
Best Conditions For Shooting Panoramas
The best candidates for panoramas are scenes that have a single subject and whose broad surroundings serve to enhance that subject. In the lighthouse example, the surrounding scene helps to show the isolation and treacherous sea conditions. The old schoolhouse example serves to provide a context of a farming community in the surrounding fields. Sunsets and sunrises also can be great panorama images, though they’re trickier to expose (see the Quick Tip below).

It’s also best if you can find scenes to photograph from a higher vantage point. Because your camera has to remain level during a panorama, a higher vantage point often will give you a more interesting foreground. We’ve spent a lot of time standing on top of our truck just to get up higher.

Quick Tip
Scenes That Work Best For Panoramas
• One subject and lots of surrounding “context”
• A location where you can shoot from a high vantage point
• Sunsets and sunrises


panoramas
Choosing Your Equipment
The truth about photography is that to do the job right, you need the right equipment. For panoramas, any camera can be used as long as it has manual white-balance and exposure capabilities. Panoramas need to be consistently exposed across all the shots, so you need your camera to stick with one exposure and one white-balance setting.

We find that the ideal setup is a D-SLR with a prime lens. Prime lenses have a single focal length and don’t zoom. They’re better for panoramas because the lens’ entrance point doesn’t move as it does in zoom lenses (see the Quick Tip below). This setup creates a panorama that stitches together better, eliminating parallax, and also loses less of the image around the edges. Prime lenses also are very sharp—always an asset. We prefer to use lenses with focal lengths in the area of 28mm up to 50mm. Keep in mind, with panoramas, we’re already shooting extra wide and will be shooting portrait orientation, so it’s important to choose a lens that has minimal distortion and good edge sharpness. We use the relatively new Zeiss ZF 28mm ƒ/2 lens that delivers excellent results on the Nikon D300.



Quick Tip
Entrance Point Of A Lens
The entrance point of a lens is where the camera must rotate to eliminate problems when images are stitched together, sometimes referred to as the “nodal point” of the lens. If you don’t rotate around the nodal point, your images may not stitch well together, will be ragged and will need to be cropped to clean up the edges, resulting in some loss of content.

You can achieve the best results by using a dedicated panorama head—one that’s designed to allow you to adjust your camera’s position so you rotate around the entrance point of your lens. While it’s possible to use a regular tripod head or even do it handheld, it’s a lot harder to stitch the frames together.

There are many panorama heads available. We use one made by Really Right Stuff, and excellent results can be had with just about any other dedicated panorama head. Yours should come with instructions on how to set it up for your lens’ entrance point. Keep in mind that you’ll need to determine this for each lens that you use. Typically, we only use one or two lenses for panoramic work, and you only need to determine the entrance point once for each lens.


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8 Comments

  1. John McKeown makes this comment

    Harvey, This is a great article. I travelled around Ireland taking 360 degree images to try to capture the "scenes". I wish I had also taken some shots to re create panoramas.

    Tue Nov 4 11:00:59 2008

  2. Bob D. makes this comment

    This YouTube site doesn't do justice to the photos but I found that slideshow software that does panning really works well with panoramas. In this case, I am using ProShow GOLD>

    Thu Sep 11 20:41:11 2008

  3. John Trammell makes this comment

    Skenick and Valente certainly make nice panoramas, and I suspect that if I followed their recommendations my panoramas would improve. However, I've stitched many panoramas since George Lepp first wrote on the subject in Outdoor Photographer, without using any special equipment other than a tripod and level. Zoom lenses are O.K. if you make sure the focal length doesn't change. Hand-held panoramas can be stitched successfully, though more cropping will likely be necessary. As far as I'm concerned the two most important factors are manual exposure and sufficient overlap. Of all the stitching programs and modules (I've used most of them) PanoramaPlus from Serif is the most forgiving of errors in leveling, overlap, etc. Using the program, I've been able to stitch scanned images that were made long before the digital era.

    Fri Sep 5 22:00:55 2008

  4. Stephen Jonas makes this comment

    Great article it answered a couple questions i've had for a while, thank you. But what got me was i've also shot that same schoolhouse. I shot it in July driving back from Yellowstone this year, it certainly is a small world.

    Wed Sep 3 14:43:03 2008

  5. Cynthia Farr-Weinfeld makes this comment

    The vertical orientation of the camera allows more room for parallax errors to be corrected, as you have more overlap on the top and the bottom. I only have PS CS2, and while my father has CS3 and has had a lot of success with it as a stitching tool, we both have found that a plug-in called PTGui is best 99.9% of the time. Thanks for sharing your techniques in this article! I'd love to be able to see your panoramas even larger--for some reason, even with Photo Zoom, they are too small to really enjoy. Thanks, Cynthia Farr-Weinfeld, Portland, ME

    Wed Sep 3 13:12:06 2008

  6. Scott Stulberg makes this comment

    Hi Harvey, You need to get an L Bracket.......online from Really Right Stuff. The L Bracket....gives you a release plate on the side of your camera.....along with the bottom of your camera. This lets you shoot vertically in seconds......and is the way many pros work. You need to be using an Arca Swiss type ballhead......because that is how the L Brackets work. And Really Right Stuff has great ballheads that have the Arca Swiss Quick release plates that work with their L Brackets. Go to their website and you will see what it is all about. I shoot many panoramas....and this is the way to go. reallyrightstuff.com good luck..... scott stulberg

    Wed Sep 3 05:55:17 2008

  7. Doug H. makes this comment

    Harvey, I would suggest you look into an "L" shaped camera plate. You'll be able to rotate from Landscape to Portrait and maintain camera balance.

    Wed Sep 3 03:52:03 2008

  8. Harvey M. makes this comment

    Your article is interesting and helpful. I am confused by your recommendation on the orientation of the camera. "Set up your camera in portrait (vertical) orientation." All of the tripod heads that I own or have seen rotate around a single point (center of the tripod) and I thought the idea is to center the camera lens at this point to minimize the shift as the camera rotates around this central pivot point. If I change the camera orientation to a portrait/vertical position, the camera will "hang over" one side of the tripod head and will no longer be centered over the pivot point. The only thing I can think of is that you have an additional attachment that holds the camera in the portrait/vertical position over the center pivot point.

    Wed Sep 3 00:58:28 2008

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