Making Panoramas Easy
Digital photography has made easy work of panoramas. It used to require a special camera or hours in the darkroom to produce what can now be done with a few clicks of the mouse.
Most digital cameras these days come with a panorama mode and software thats merges (stitches) all the photos together for you.
Using the panorama mode in the camera, you shoot the first photo as you normally would. then the display changes to show you about 1/3 of the first photo and a live view of what you see now. You simply line up what you see now with what you photographed in the first shot, and take the next photo. You take pictures, overlapping them a bit until you have photographed the whole scene.
You end up with individual photos much like those above I took of the Louvre in Paris.
If you shoot Canon like I do, they include a program called Photostich on the CD with the camera. Olympus, Nikon, everyone has a similar program for you to use, or there are MANY after market ones that are more flexable and offer more control over the stitching. Just do a Google search for panorama software.
Basically you load the images into the program, tell the program which order they are photographed in, press a button and boom, out comes your panorama. You will notice in the above example how things that move do not do so well in panoramas. A car was in one of the photos I took, but it was gone by the time I took the second overlapping photo, so it is only half in the finished photo. An attention to detail is very important when
shooting this way.
It is important to watch for changes in lighting while shooting your panorama. If the sun goes away for half of the photos, your scene may not look natural if half of it is in the shade. So it is important to try and keep the lighting and exposure constant.
Keep your feet pointed in the same direction for all the photos, turn your body instead. Turning your feet makes it harder to keep the photos lined up correctly.
And remember to be creative. Why not try a vertical panorama like the one to the left, or a horizontal one with the camera held vertically as in the Hilton Falls photo at the top of this article.
Happy Shooting!
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