Making Panoramas

Photographic panoramas can be made with Photoshop's Photomerge. They will be images which are wide, very wide or the full 360 degrees and they have been around from almost the earliest days of photography.

Panoramas can be taken with very basic, modest equipment if the technique is correct; or you can spend many thousands on specialist gear, but still the technique needs to be right.

If Santa has forgotten to leave you the latest Roundshot camera, then it's down to the more basic way of making panoramas. This is to take a series of photographs with a regular camera and stitch them together on the computer. It's more trouble, but once organized the system to relatively simple and can produce excellent results.

You can use even the simplest of film or digital cameras.
The easiest way to start panoramas is to begin with a landscape. The safest start with fewer problems is a scene from the top of a hill with a maximum field of view of 180 degrees.
There should be no objects near the camera as this causes extra problems, which will be covered later.

If you are photographing landscapes or long distance scenes as panoramas, then a sturdy tripod with a smooth pan head will do the job. Most will have degree markings around the circumference.



Photography method

• Place the camera on the tripod.
  Remember we are photographing a distant scene here, with no objects close to the camera.

• Ensure the camera is straight and level. An accurate 2 dimensional spirit level is essential, but not one of those circular things which are impossible to set level.

• Make sure the camera is level around the whole view, from the start to the end. If the horizon is not kept absolutely level, it will bow up or down, and straight lines become curves. It's unlikely, but you might want this effect, although it makes it much harder to join everything up.

• When taking a panorama from the top of a hill, it's a simple matter to pan the camera all the way round and check it is level everywhere.

• The images should have an overlap of at least 30% to allow for a good blend.

• For a landscape of distant hills, a 50mm lens is likely to be the best option.
  A 50mm lens will cover 44 degrees; 30% of this is 15 degrees, so each image should cover 30 degrees. Six horizontal images are required for the 180 degrees.

• Carefully following the degree markings on the rotating head, a new photograph can be taken at every 30 degrre mark, giving us our 30% overlap.

• Plenty of overlap also helps if there is movement in the images. There will be more choice when choosing the overlap points.

• Extra care needs to be taken with exposure. It can vary greatly from one side of the scene to the other. Digital capture has a large exposure latitude. Negative film has better latitude here than transparency film, so if using film, the former is a better choice.
  Take meter readings all around the scene and choose the optimum average, giving emphasis to the shadows.
  Give every image the same exposure.

• When scanning film, scan the frame with the largest brightness range, lock this exposure into the settings and scan the other frames with the same settings.

Who knows which was the world's first panorama; cameras were being modified to take them as early as the 1840s.
One of the most significant early examples must have been taken in 1879. Professional photographer Arnold Knott created a 360 degree panoramic photograph of Oldham, an industrial town in North England.

He used a 10"x8" camera and glass plates, taking a series of nine images.
Originally, of course, the photographs were joined together manually with photographic prints, knife and glue. More recently, the negatives have been scanned, cleaned up and joined on the computer. The result is an impressive piece of work and a rare historical document.

There are well over 100 industrial chimneys in the completed image and that is now down to about three as historical monuments.
Periodically on display in the Oldham Art Gallery, it is nearly 2 metres high and 18 metres long.





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Photomerge
The Nodal Point
Tripod heads for panoramas
Software for panoramas
Panoramic cameras

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