Panoramic Photo's

[jjeling]

I wanted to put this in the same thread as the image games but I figured there would not be many of these. Hopefully you guys can prove me wrong. Anyways, These are the only two panoramic shots I have ever composed. The one is our house in the middle of winter. I need to get back this spring, and next fall to try it again. The other one is in Canada on Rainy Lake where my father and I went on our fishing trip. Anyways, I hope these will not be the only two to get posted. I would really love to see some others if anyone else has them.

[dmagick]

Nice I take quite a few pano's (and have some more still to put together from a trip to New Zealand a couple of years ago).

Here's a couple of mine.

[Iguanasan]

I've only ever done one but I think I will try some more. This one is a 360 degree pano

[mindforge]

I have never done a pano but I am going to try this week I think. How do I to it? I have heard that you cannot hand shoot it and that I need a special head for my tripod. I shoot people but I think it would be awesome to make a pano portrait or try and play with that kind of a shot.

[dmagick]

I've only ever done one but I think I will try some more. This one is a 360 degree pano

Nice How did you stitch it or what software did you use? The couple of times I tried a 360deg pano the software wouldn't handle it.

[Gem]

Here's one of Abu Dhabi when I was in the United Arab Emirates. (And done without tripod)

[dmagick]

I have never done a pano but I am going to try this week I think. How do I to it? I have heard that you cannot hand shoot it and that I need a special head for my tripod. I shoot people but I think it would be awesome to make a pano portrait or try and play with that kind of a shot.

There's a heap of info here - http://www.panoguide.com/howto/

I'll still give my basic tips anyway (someone please correct me if anything is wrong!).

- Use a tripod (makes rotating around a single point easier). I don't have a special panorama head, it's just a ball head.
- Only use a UV filter. If you use a circ. polarizer (or grad nd filter) you'll have a painful time trying to stitch it.
- Once you've worked out an exposure (you'll need to focus on one area to get a reading, but make sure it's ok for the rest of the scene), switch your camera to manual and set your exposure/shutter speed. Means it won't change throughout the whole set
- Use manual focus (same reason as above).
- Make sure you overlap your shots. Stitching software looks for common points between images when it puts it all together, overlapping your shots will make this work better.
- Shooting vertical is better. This is mainly so after it's all put together you can crop things the way you want. (also means more shots = bigger end result).

I sometimes bracket my shots to give me a little latitude but depends on the situation.

I think that's it

[kat]

These are great! I can't wait to try one too! Great tips!

[jjeling]

Yeah, these are great. Its good to see what else you guys have done. These are great things to try when you have the opportunity. dmagick sounds looks and sounds like he has it down. Those are some great tips. Nice job.

[Iguanasan]

Nice How did you stitch it or what software did you use? The couple of times I tried a 360deg pano the software wouldn't handle it.

I did a lot of hunting for stitching software and finally found this site:

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

Note you have to buy one of the products that AutoStitch is built into if you plan to do this on a regular basis. I only tried the demo once. My PowerShot camera came with a disk with some pano software on it but I haven't tried it yet.