![]() I often use the 70-200 mm lens with a tripod foot, and rotate the camera and lens in the tripod ring to keep the centre of gravity over the rotation axis of the tripod for better balance and to stop the camera from moving sideways as I rotate the camera. When shooting for stitched panoramas with a little more time, I try to use a tripod. If you have any specular highlights, you might choose to allow them to overexpose a little, but try not to overexpose much of the image or you will lose detail in those areas. Although it’s possible to deal with dark shadows later, to give your image the best chance, use the ETTR (Expose to the Right) technique discussed in Episode 381. ![]() Take a look at the entire scene you intend to shoot when you do this, and set your exposure for the brightest part of the scene. If you prefer an automatic exposure mode for your general shooting, get your exposure where you want it to be with your typical shooting style, but then make a mental note of your settings, then go to Manual, and set your camera to those settings. To overcome this, it’s generally better to lock your exposure down in Manual mode. ![]() For example, the sky might have bands of varying brightness, which obviously looks terrible. One important thing to remember when shooting for panoramas is that if you shoot in an automatic exposure mode such as Program or Aperture Priority, your resulting images will have various exposure levels, and this makes it very difficult to create a consistent look across the stitched image. There’s little point in using a tripod from a moving base, and our bodies actually compensate for the rocking quite well as we automatically try to stop ourselves from falling over. This method also works well when photographing from a rocking ship, like this photograph (below), which was stitched together from a series of frames shot hand-held from the stern of a rocking ship heading down the Beagle Channel in Argentina, on my way to Antarctica. With the stitching software being so good these days, this method is generally fine, and although we’ll go on to talk about much more complicated methods today, depending on the situation, I really don’t mind when this is my only option. If I’m running and gunning I will sometimes simply find my scene, flip the camera vertically, and shoot a series of hand-held images. I have printed single frame crops at 40″ wide though, having blown the image up with onOne Software’s Perfect Resize, so if there are reasons for shooting a single frame and cropping, such as having a lot of moving elements in the scene that would make sticking virtually impossible, then I’ll do that, but like to avoid it when possible. ![]() On rare occasions I simply crop a single frame down to create a panoramic aspect ratio image, but that results in a small image, which won’t be optimal for large prints. I use a number of methods depending on the situation. Multiple Ways to Shoot Base Imagesįor panorama photographs comprised of multiple images stitched together, there are multiple ways to shoot your base images, and infinite levels of intricacy depending on how much work you are prepared to do for the end product. Otherwise, we’ll get to that in a future episode. Although I’ll try to cover the actual process of stitching the images together on the computer at a later date, if you would like this information sooner rather than later, perhaps consider picking up a copy of this eBook and following along with that, if you don’t already have a copy that is. Today’s episode is actually an adapted version of a topic I cover in detail in my Striking Landscapes eBook from Craft & Vision. We’re going to cover two methods for finding the No Parallax Point which helps with avoiding parallax shift, as well as looking at some easier methods of shooting that also work great. Today I’m going to walk you through a few tips for shooting images to later stitch together to create high resolution panorama photographs.
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