Photography Magazine

If you have been following our tutorials on panoramic photography, you were probably able to make near perfect panoramic images, with a little bit of luck. If your photographs didn’t seem to stitch together well, the most probable cause is that you had objects very close to you. Read on…

If you have been shooting panoramas hand-held, its about time you started using a tripod. And not just any tripod (although just any tripod is better than no tripod at all). Let us consider an ordinary tripod with a regular camera mounted on it. Try this test - compose your viewfinder image in such a manner so as to have a vertical line close to the camera (say 2 or 3 feet away) and another away from the camera (maybe 6 to 10 feet away). The closer vertical line could simply mean the edge of a near object such as a computer monitor or a fence (if outdoors). Similarly the further vertical line could be the edge of an object or a wall some distance away from your camera. Notice the distance between the two vertical lines in your view finder. Now, turn the tripod head towards the right or to the left while keeping your eyes on the distance between the two (vertical lines). Nine times out of ten, the gap will seemingly increase or decrease as you rotate the tripod head. This is simply thanks to the parallax error caused by the fact the camera does not have its tripod mount socket located at the optic center of the lens. In fact it is not possible to have the tripod mount at the optic center of the lens, since that point is somewhere inside the camera body! To avoid the parallax error, we need to make sure that the camera is mounted to the tripod in such a manner so as to rotate from its optic center when you turn the tripod head. That is the only way you can shoot perfect panoramas.

That is exactly where the panoramic tripod head can help, and it is specifically designed so as to allow you to shoot perfect panoramic images that can be stitched to each other without a problem. The panoramic head usually has a vertical arm and a horizontal arm that allow you to move the camera mount horizontally as well as vertically. To adjust the camera so as to allow it to rotate from the optic center of the lens, you need to mount the camera on the tripod indirectly using the panoramic head (the panoramic head fits on to your regular tripod head). Then you need to, as mentioned earlier, position your camera so you see one near and one far vertical line in the finder. Now, you experiment by moving the camera vertically and/or horizontally until it is positioned in such a manner so as to totally avoid the parallax error. By this we mean, there would be no change in the distance between the two vertical lines when you rotate the camera this way or that.

Ok - you’ve got your self a panoramic tripod head. You’ve aligned it to suit your camera-lens combination (it is a good idea to mark the position of the brackets so you do not have to go through the painful process of aligning your camera and lens every time you have to shoot a panorama). You’ve also found a great landscape or interior location to shoot your panorama. You mount your camera on the tripod using your panoramic tripod head. You shoot your 360 degree (or partial) panorama. Now comes the painful task of stitching together the images on  manual software, right? Wrong! There are dedicated software on the market for this very task. And what’s more, they also publish your images in variable formats. Once you have the shooting mastered, you need to invest into a good panoramic software. This technology was first introduced by Apple USA, on their VR WORX software that played panoramas on the Apple Quicktime player. Today there are a number of software available on the market to stitch and publish your work. We will not deal with any specific software here, but speak of the basic principles behind every one of them. Any panorama software involves the execution of three basic steps mentioned below.

The Shooting Stage

This involves positioning the camera and lens on a tripod with a panoramic head (as mentioned in earlier tutorials). Whatever the software you will be using to stitch together your images, it will never work (just as you will never be able to manually stitch the images either) unless the camera was positioned at the optic center of the lens while shooting. Different software will call for different shooting methods - some will ask for images of top, down, left, right, front and back, some will ask for panoramic images shot rotating the tripod head clockwise, etc. But remember, in every case the camera and lens first need to be mounted correctly on the tripod.

The Stitching Stage

Now ends the hard work and now begins the fun! When you have photographed the required images, you load them on to the panorama software and click away. Usually the stitching is completely automated while you sit back and relax.

The Publishing Stage

Next you will need to publish your panorama… you could choose to publish it as a jpg for print format. On the other hand you could choose to publish it on the web, so as to make an interactive panorama. Interactive panoramas invite a user to click and drag with the mouse so as to be able to ‘look’ this way or that, giving them the feeling of standing in a room or at a location and looking around. This has today become the norm to market real estate in most developed countries. To view the published Panoramas on a web page, the user usually needs a JAVA enabled computer or a FLASH player. But let us not get involved with the graphic design stage…

If you have read the introductory article on Panoramic photography you may wish to give a better, more professional looking finish to your panoramas than to simply stick the images on card. There is of course a digital way to do this. In fact there is more than one digital way. Let us look at the Photoshop way for a start. This is of course assuming that the reader already has a basic knowledge of this image editing software’s applications and controls and commands. If not, it would be pretty difficult to get into digital panoramic photography at all and we would suggest a few weeks oh Photoshop tutorials and practice first.If you have 3 images to be stitched, open them all in Photoshop. Any version of the software would work for this. Check out the size of your images. Make a horizontal box so 3 images would easily fit into it. If your images at 640 by 480 resolution for example, you would want a box of 640 height (at least) and around 1500 length roughly. We will make it the appropriate size later.

Drag and drop all three images into this horizontal box and select appropriate layers to adjust the layers 1,2 and 3 (or however you have chosen to name them) so that they align to make your panorama. More often than not, when you shoot hand held panoramas, your images would probably appear to fit in a zig zag manner, with some higher than the previous and some lower. Do not worry about this just yet. We shall get to shooting perfect panoramas in a later article. For the time being we shall simply crop away the ‘extra area’ using the crop tool on Photoshop, resulting in a neat Panorama’.

Do note that you may have to adjust the tonal values brightness and contrast on certain images for them to match seamlessly. This is more common when you have photographed using the auto mode of the camera, so try and shoot using a manual camera mode (where it is  possible) and set the same exposure for all images of the panorama. Anyway, we shall get back to perfect panoramas later, as mentioned earlier. Let us get the basics first.

So - now we have a 3 ’stitched’ images, with one or more probably out of horizontal level. So, use the crop tool to cut off the additional area and you will have something that looks much better.

Easy wasn’t that? Try and experiment with 4 or 5 or even more images that you stitch using photoshop. You will soon learn to get your images more or less aligned even with hand held photography. Once you have a couple of perfect horizontal panoramas, you could get them printed at a lab and cut away the white area to leave a panoramic print. The prints can then be mounted and framed to decorate your interiors. Remember, like everything else, practice makes perfect where panoramic stitching is concerned.

When you think of panoramic photography, the image of a horizontally long photograph comes to mind. Panorama is nothing new to the world of photography. Its been around for almost as long as the art of photography itself, but it is also true that this form of photography has evolved just like everything else. Let us get into the basics of panoramic photography.

Panorama was earlier done using an extra long bit of sheet film and a lens with more than average field of view. If you do not really know what that means, dont worry about it. Today you can make panoramic images with any film or digital camera, and digital does make things easier where image stitching is concerned. On that note, let us learn a little about image stitching which is the basis of panoramic photography. Try this for a start - place your camera on a tripod and shoot your first photograph as you normally would. Then, rotate the tripod head to the right and frame your second shot making sure that the two photographs overlap each other to about 25% at least. You could shoot a third and a fourth image as well. The resulting images would look something like this…

It is easy to see now, that the 3 images can simply be combined to make one panoramic imahe. But how do you actually ’stitch’ the images together? We shall get to the stitching options later. For this introductory exercise, let us simply make 3 prints and paste them on a hardboard or something similar, so it is understood what is required. Do not be put off if your first attempt does not immediately provide good results. One thing you need to keep in mind is to make sure your tripod head is aligned well. For this purpose, a tripos head with a spirit level would work well. It is possible to shoot a series of overlapping images hand held, with care - but it would never be perfect shooting this way. In any case, if you stitch your 3 or 4 images together by sticking them side by side so that the overlapping areas create a panoramic effect, you would have something like this as a result -

 Do note that the images have been photographed vertically so that one has the maximum vertical field of view or coverage. We have the luxury to shoot as many images as needed to cover the horizontal axis, so let us always remember that the vertical axis is not being stitched, and so we shoot with the camera held (or mounted to the tripod) vertically. Go ahead and experiment with image stitching to get the feel of panoramic photography. Every photographer remembers the excitement on creating his or her first pano stitch. The images above have been photographed hand held. One can see where the stitch is not perfect, but this is probably what your first few stitches would turn out as. Try sticking your images on a black card to create exciting panoramic cityscapes and landscapes.