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…