Panoramas: How-To

I have gotten some questions on how I create these panoramas. Actually it is rather simple. The first couple of panoramas on these pages have all been created hand held, you don't need a tripod or panorama head to create panoramas like these, but it sure helps! If you are serious about panoramas you should consider getting one. If you decide to shoot without a panorama head, try to rotate the camera around a point inside your lens. Ideally you should find the exact point but since you are shooting without support it is kind of pointless.

Also, have generous overlap of the images. I use the grid in the viewfinder of the D70 to find the overlap when shooting hand held and the degree scale when using the panosaurus. I let the images overlap the previous one by one row (1/4th of the total image width or height) in the viewfinder. This makes stitching very simple.

Shoot with fixed white balance. Do not use the Auto-mode since you can get different color casts in different parts of the image.

Shoot with manual exposure mode if possible. To meter I often use the quick-and-dirty metod of averaging the exposure over the whole scene. I set my camera to aperture priority mode, set the aperture value I wish to shoot at and see what exposure times I get. Then I pick an exposure time in the middle of this range and switch to manual exposure mode. Some hightlights might be blown and some shadows might be too dark, but unless you are creating HDR-images you will have to live with that. A more ambitious method would be to spot meter the scene and pick an exposure that would give you what you wants, depending upon if you think the hightlights or the shadows are worth saving.

Switch to manual focus. Have the same camera-to-subject focus distance in all images. You can see how wierd it looks whe one part of the image has another focus distance than the rest of the image in my image "Kista Science Tower". Also it is faster to work if your camera doesn't have to refocus each time. Sometime it might even be impossible to use the autofocus, if one image consists mainly of contrast free surfaces where the auto-focus sensors look.

If placing the keypoints by hand, be thorough. Usually I place 3-6 keypoints in each image pair. I try to spread them over the entire overlap and if possible avoid to have them in a straight line. Try to find a detail in the image which is easy to identify (so that you can find it in the corresponding image) and remember to place it as exactly as you can.