Arnoud Quanjer Wildlife Photography

One of the things I enjoy doing is making panoramic images. With panoramic images I mean taking a number of pictures and stitching them together to for a seamless picture. It's taken me some time to get it right, but I think I have 'mastered' the technique now.

What equipment do you need

For taking successful panorama pictures you'll at least need to use a tripod and you need to use some kind of bubble spirit level to get your camera aligned with the horizon. Aligning your camera with the horizon is one of the most important things to get right in a panorama shot so get a bubble spirit level that you can for instance attach to your camera's hot-shoe. I use a Hama Double-Bubble Spirit Level which fits the flash hot-shoe of my camera for this purpose. I also always use a cable-release to make sure that the pictures are as sharp as they can possibly be. Optional equipment would include a dedicated panorama tripod head. Panoramic images can suffer from parallax errors if the camera is not rotated through the central 'nodal point' of the lens. This problem can be solved by a panoramic tripod head. The purpose of a panorama head is to position the nodal point of the lens over the centre of rotation of the tripod. You can either buy a panorama tripod head or make one yourself. I don't use a dedicated panorama tripod head myself. My equipment is heavy enough as it is and panorama's are just a hobby of mine so I don't mind the small parallax error that is introduced by using my non-dedicated tripod head. If you need more information on panoramic tripod heads then please use Google as there are lots and lots of web sites that offer detailed information.

You've setup your tripod...?

A very important thing to remember when taking panoramic shots is to make lots of pictures for one panoramic shot and to use the same exposure and aperture for all the pictures. If you don't use the same settings for all the pictures then you'll see color differences when merging the pictures into one big panoramic pictures. What I usually do is determine the highlight in a panorama and expose all the images for that highlight. This sounds very technical, but what it means is that you select the brightest point in your panorama (the highlight) and determine such an exposure that the highlight is not blown. In other words position the highlight as far to the right side of the color histogram without blowing the highlight. Using the color histogram this is a pretty easy job on a DSLR. You want to see maximum depth-of-field (DOF) in a panorama shot set the aperture to f/8 or smaller before you determine the exposure. When you have set your aperture and have determined the exposure then set your camera to Manual mode and dial in the aperture and exposure. After you have done this you can be sure that all pictures will be taken using identical settings.

Now that you've setup your tripod and dialed in the correct exposure and aperture you have to find a point to focus on. Please refer to the 'Hyperfocal distance' paragraph for information on where to focus. After setting your focal point  set the camera to manual focus as you don't want the focal point to shift when taking pictures. Once you've done all that all there is to do is taking pictures. Start at the extreme left or right of the intended panorama and start taking pictures. Make sure that the pictures overlap a fair bit as this improves the final result. I usually use a 60-75% overlap and that seems to work well. When you are taking pictures make sure that all the pictures you take are taken in similar conditions. If you start the picture series with bright sunlight then make sure that you take all the pictures in this bright sunlight. That means that if clouds move in front of the sun that you wait untill they're gone. If you don't make sure that the conditions are the same during the shoot you will see color differences in the final result.

Don't use an extreme wide-angle lens for the pictures as these lenses usually exhibit quite a bit of distortion which negatively influences the end result. It's better to use a 50mm lens and take 10 pictures then to use a 16mm lense and take 3 pictures. I've made panorama shots using a 50mm lens which consist of over 30 pictures and they've turned out fine. On the other hand I've never taken good panorama shots using an extreme wide-angle lens.

Hyperfocal distance

When you focus your camera for please keep the hyperfocal distance of your lens in mind. When you read this chances are that you've never heard of the hyperfocal distance before. Not to worry, most photographers are not aware of this phenomonen. If you enjoy shooting landscape pictures of panorama pictures then it's a thing you should take notice of though. Famous photographer John Shaw defines the hyperfocal distance as "The hyperfocal distance is the point of focus where everything from half that distance to infinity falls within the depth of field.". What this means in laymans terms is that at every aperture every lens has a distance setting that produces the greatest depth of field. Landscape photographs are often taken with the lens focused at the hyperfocal distance; near and distant objects are sharp in the photos.

Normal to wide-angle lenses are good lenses to use for landscape photographs, and thus also panoramic images, as these lenses all have a relatively short hyperfocal distance when set to large f-numbers (small apertures). A 28mm lens set to f/16 for example has a hyperfocal distance of around about 1,80m. This means that everything from 90cm to infinity will be sharp in a photograph taken with this lens focused at the hyperfocal distance. This also means that focussing further away, for instance at the horizon or a distant tree, is useless. Determine the hyperfocal distance of your lens before you take the shot and focus at half that length. It's probably a good idea to determine the hyperfocal distance at the various apertures for your lens of choice before you go on a trip. Because of the hyperfocal distance telephoto lenses are rarely used for landscape photography. The hyperfocal distance of a telephoto lens is quite large. If you for example use a 200mm lens set to f/16 then the hyperfocal distance will be close to 100m and thus everything from about 50m to infinity will be sharp. For landscape photography that is not a good thing as the objects from your camera to 50m away won't be sharp.

When you determine the hyperfocal distance of your lens it's important to take into effect the extension factor of your camera if you're using a DSLR. If you're for instance using a 24mm lens on a Canon 30D then the 35mm equivalent of the lens will be a 38,4mm lens as the 30D has an extension factor of 1.6x. You can use one of the many available online hyperfocal distance calculators to calculate the hyperfocal distance for your lenses on the various aperture settings. A good calculator which takes into account the extension factor of your camera can be found here.

You've made the pictures...and now?

Now you've setup your tripod, you've determined the exposure, you've focused your lens at the hyperfocal distance of the lens and you've taken all the pictures needed for a panorama picture....what now? All that needs to be done now is to stitch all of these pictures together to form one big panorama image. You can try to stitch the pictures together yourself using Photoshop but it's much easier to use a dedicated software program that can do the stitching for you. If you've made your pictures in RAW mode then you first have to convert the pictures to TIFF or JPEG format. The reason for this is that the software programs that are available for stitching together your images will not be able to read the proprietary RAW format file that your camera produces. To be able to use your images in these software programs you'll first have to convert your pictures to TIFF or JPEG format files. When you convert them to RAW mode make sure that the same processing parameters are set for all pictures! If you don't use the same settings then you'll introduce color differences which you'll see in the end result.

There are a number of software products available for stiching together your pictures. I've personally only used one product as I think it's near perfect, and best of all it's free for non-commercial use. This product is called Autostitch. You can download Autostitch here. All you have to do in Autostitch is select all the pictures your panorama is made up of and Autostitch will start generating the panorama picture immediately. The output picture will be called pano.jpg and it will be located in the same directory as the input pictures. The default output setting for Autostitch will not be a full sized panorama. To get a maximum size panorama image go to the Edit-Options menu and set the scale to 100%.

Example

I took a panorama shot using eight images in Kalahari Tented Camp in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in South Africa in April 2007. I used a 24-70 f/2.8 L lens @ 24mm. The exposure was 1/100sec using f/16 at 100ISO. If you put the images together yourself in Photoshop using cut and paste then the panorama would look like this.

From this example you can clearly see that I'm not very exact in how much I let the images overlap. In general I aim for 60-75% overlap but it's not really an exact science. The more you let the pictures overlap the better the end result will get. In this case I reckoned that eight to ten pictures would get me a perfect panoramic shot of the view from the honeymoon tent, and the end result showed that I was right. Here's what Autostitch generates from these eight pictures.

As you can see the picture needs to be cropped a bit to remove some black borders. These borders were caused by parallax errors due to the fact that I wasn't using a dedicated panoramic tripod head. A bit of cropping removes the black borders easily though. To give you an idea of the full size of this panorama picture; the resolution of the full size of this panorama is 13957x2321 pixels.