Article by Binny Varghese

Tips for panorama photography 

I have a niche for Photography & for today will just share some important basic tips that I know of.

It is said that to be a real photographer you need to have a digital SLR camera, for those of you who do not know what a SLR is, “Single Lens Reflex”, a type of camera used by photographers throughout the world. I recommend a Nikon D40 SLR. It’s one of the basic SLRs and a best one to start with if you are just a beginner or an amature. With a basic lens of 18-55mm with the camera

For today’s tip, let’s look at the art of perfect “Panorama Photography”. This is a type of photography where a wide picture is presented, by taking multiple shots and stitching them together or say merging them together.

Equipment:

• Nothing fancy, a digital camera will make life much easier as this enables use software rather than scanners to merge photos.
• Flash is a bad idea for Panorama.
• Using Tripod will give better results
• Using the self timer will help keep it steady for long exposures.

Taking the photos:

• Find yourself a nice scene, and work along the bits you want, in rows or columns.
• Most software wants about 20% overlap at each side.

• Avoid wide variations in brightness.
• Review the images before leaving the scene!
• Try and avoid things being very close to the camera – this will make any camera movement between shots VERY obvious, and ruin the results.
• Remember to rotate around the camera position, not just turn in a circle holding the camera.
• Windy days can cause problems, as trees, flags, and other things bend in the wind and change position. For some strange reason, ripples on water do not seem to have this problem .
• It’s a shame to spoil a sequence of  images because your finger was over the lens for 1 of them! If you really want that photo, try taking two complete sets of images – perhaps with different overlap areas. This is particularly recommended if circumstances are difficult, e.g. bad light, long exposures, many moving people

What to Avoid?

People in Panoramas.

People can be a problem, particularly in busy areas. Try and keep people who are moving near the centre of that frame. Those on the edges will often appear as ghosts in the final image, as they will be in a different position in the next frame if overlapped. This can look rather effective, so don’t be put off if there are large numbers of people moving through the scene you want to photograph.

Avoid this error in panorama

But remember, you only need the people out of the frame you are taking, so if a scene is not too busy, you can remove people one frame at a time.

Alternatively, if the people don’t actually fall partway out of a frame, you can always use the original frames to retouch the panorama, for example by using the ever popular ‘clone’ tool, to copy an unfaded version of a person over the top of the faded parts.

Other friendly-tips to make you an instant Pro

Scenes with many large objects at differing distances often work well. You often will need some sort of interesting shape on the larger scales to make it look good. I find that a large feature at each end of an image to ‘book end’ the scene can work very nicely. Extreme symmetry can look very dull in normal photo, reducing it to simple geometric blocks, but it can work very well in a panorama. I find that bridges can work very nicely, (that’s why there are so many in my panoramas!)

You can get some very interesting photos if you get someone to move from one frame to another as you take the photos! I recommend only using the person in every other shot, or you may find it tricky to get the blending right.

panorama photography

Sunny days with big fluffy clouds work nicely for many subjects, but avoid shooting into the sun. Also be aware that if you have any frames dominated by sky, stitching the images may become tricky.

If you have several rows of images, so there is a large image vertically as well as horizontally, distortions are unavoidable. But this too can work in your favour, provided you do not insist on a realistic look. For example, the way that rectangular structures turn into smoothly flowing curves can be reminiscent of an Escher engraving.

Or extreme perspective can be used to give an extremely dramatic viewpoint:

panorama photography

To sum it up, the key to good panoramic photography is using still photographs by the help of tripods, good lighting and view and the most importantly a software to stitch the photographs together like “Photoshop”, “omnistitcher” etc, which helps to merge the images together.

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