| PANORAMA PHOTOGRAPHY A
short tutorial by Bruce Dale
Sunrise at Banshee Reeks, Virginia
Introduction:
In
1851, only 12 years after the advent of photography, an unknown
photographer created a panorama of San Francisco harbor from a series
of daguerreotypes. 55 years later in the same city, George R. Lawrence
lofted his “captive airship” to photograph the aftermath of the earthquake
from 2000 feet up. It was actually a 49-pound panorama camera tethered
beneath a series of kites. The result -- an amazing 18 3/4 x 48 3/4
inch contact print.
I’ve had good success making panorama
photos from a variety of cameras ranging from sub $800 consumer cameras
to professional film and digital cameras.
Remember, panorama images utilize the same composition rules of standard format pictures. Merely taking a standard scene and making it wider isn't going to automatically make a successful panorama -- the entire image must work together esthetically.
SETTING UP: First: Level
your tripod independent of the tripod head. Having the base level assures
you that the rotational plane will be on a
Recently I had a chance to try Really Right Stuff’s “Panning Clamp with Level” and it worked well with one of Gitzo’s new “wobbler” center column tripods. The clamp alone runs $235 but it is truly a gem of engineering. The level was dead-on. This RRS Pan head and Gitzo’s 1227LVL carbon fibre tripod is a perfect backpacking combination.
Second: I mount my camera and use a bubble level to level the camera. Then, I do a verification by matching the corners of the image. I view the top left corner and rotate the camera to find a good alignment target. Then I swing the camera to make sure thetop right corner is on the exact same target. This verifies the images will match end to end and corrects for any slight errors in balancing either the base or camera.I use a perspective corrector lenses to move the image up or down to adjust the vertical composition -- the best way to guarantee a level horizon. However, I’ve found with some lenses (usually longer than 35mm, you can get away with carefully tipping the camera forward or back to get more sky or foreground.
If your final images go together in a stepped fashion or assemble in a large arc, you know something was not leveled properly. Before shooting in the field verify that your bubble level is accurate as I've seen poorly aligned levels in very expensive tripods. You can save a misaligned image by cropping the top or bottom, adding missing portions, or doing some custom image stretching.
Third: Ideally you should be pivoting the assembly on the nodal point of the lens to eliminate any parallax errors. This is most noticeable when you have objects in the foreground less than 50 or 100 feet away. Here are some tools I use followed by a method to determine the nodal point of your particular lens. Basically, you want to be able to rotate the camera on an invisible spot somewhere beneath the beneath the lens It may be beneath the front element or with some cameras it could be beneath the film plane. It depends on lens design. With variable focus or zoom lenses, the nodal point will probably shift as you change focal lengths.
Hardware: You need a way to slide the camera left, right, fore and aft. A solution for small cameras is the Wimberly M-8 plate shown below combined with a camera base plate. It's simple, lightweight, and the least expensive I've found. Caution -- this is a 4-inch plate and will only work with short lenses and some pro-sumer cameras. Don't forget to measure from the back of your camera. Part # M-8 at about $85.
With all these plates, you'll need an Arca Swiss type camera base plate. The custom fitted ones are best, but Wimberly makes a little universal plate (P-5) for about $52. And, of course, you’ll need an Arca Swiss type tripod head with the above plates.
Finding
the Nodal Point: To find the exact
optical pivot point of the lens, set up your camera as described above
and find a thin foreground object such as this small branch shown below.
Align it with a background object.
Now, when you rotate your camera on your tripod head,
you should not see any movement between the foreground object and the
background. It should stay in direct alignment. Here's an example of what
it should NOT look like.
One thing you must realize is that all lenses, including
some of the very finest architectural lenses, have a bit of distortion.
They are not perfectly rectilinear and will have a bit of barrel distortion.
Here's an exaggerated example of what I'm talking about: Obviously, putting two images like this together
side-to-side is going to present some problems. You cannot expect to put
them to overlap perfectly - no matter how careful you are in the shooting
process. However, if you put these images together and have
them overlap, you'll find there will be points that do overlap although
they will not be in a direct vertical alignment. IMAGE CAPTURE:
Position your tripod carefully before you do any
fine adjustments and balancing. I recommend you make your composition
with your camera hand-held. I find that even an inch will often improve
the composition. When you find the shooting spot, then and only then attach
your tripod. If you try and do this with the camera on the tripod you’re
often settling for the most “comfortable” spot.
Overlap: Balance your camera and preview the image by rotating
the camera on the tripod. Verify the level by matching corners as you
rotate. Decide how many exposures you will need and plan the capture so
critical areas will not fall on a seam. I usually overlap about 25% but
with very wide-angle lenses, you may wish to increase this to as much
as 50%. Personally, I never increment in precise numbers. With my Nikons,
I like to use the outside brackets as markers.
Make sure you turn off all the AUTO modes on your
camera. I always shoot with my exposure control set on manual to make
sure the image densities are identical. Turn off your auto color balance.
Know your camera’s personal tastes – I like to set the color balance on
“cloudy” in order to get a slightly warmer image. Make sure your focus
is locked so it isn’t changing. Set your ISO at its lowest speed to give
you the finest quality. When setting the exposure, I favor the highlight
areas and I use raw format whenever possible to allow me to easily bring
out underexposed areas. Finally, make an extra exposure at each end of
the scene in case you need it later.
There are several fine "stitching" programs
that do a fairly good job of assembling images. Your camera may have come
with one. However, with these programs, I've usually found areas that
were obvious or detectable and I learned that I could use Photoshop to
assemble images in a totally seamless fashion.
I suggest you use Photoshop’s’ “Auto Merge” and let
it attempt the merge. You can then save the file along with layers and
fine tune the image. Or, assemble your images in Photoshop by starting
with the most important image as a base and use Images/Canvas to increase
the picture area. I drag another photo on top of this image to create
a new layer. I then set the new layer to about 60% translucency and carefully
align a critical spot -- possibly a tree on the horizon. I then go back
to 100% translucency on this layer and fine tune this combination using
Photoshop's layer mask feature. Here's an example with the layers pulled
apart. Note the meandering blend line.
Sunrise
Dixie National Forest, Utah I print my images on one of several Epson printers.
My 9600 or 10000 will knock out an image quickly on 44 inch wide paper.
The 9600 is set up with mat ink and the 10K is optimized and profiled
for glossy paper. However, all my others, from my R800, 1280, 2200 or
4000 with roll paper adapters will make beautiful prints – they just take
longer. The above tips work well for me. However, I have made many very nice panoramas that were hand held without a tripod. Just make sure you keep the above guidelines in mind. Don't be afraid to experiment.
I hope this information will help you with your panorama photography. Good shooting.
Bruce Dale
E-mail badpix@aol.com
Equipment discussed above. Epson Printers
www.epson.com Gitzo Tripods & Manfrotto
3502 www.bogenimaging.us Wimberly www.tripodhead.com Really Right Stuff www.reallyrightstuff.com Kirk Enterprises www.kirkphoto.com |
A side effect is that a relatively small resolution camera can produce
images of 40or 50 megabytes resulting in very sharp prints. My favorite
combination is the Nikon D2X with the 28mm PC or 35mm PC lenses. The
perspective corrector lenses allow me to raise or lower the lens to
emphasize sky or foreground without getting the horrible horizon curvature
I often got when I tilted my Fujiwide 6x17 or Widelux camera.
level
axis.I use a Gitzo tripod with a small bubble level built-in to the
tripod. Lately, I’ve added a $65 Manfrotto compact leveling head (BG3502)
(rt)
