Part 2 - Panoramic Photography - Tips and Tricks

Panoramic Photography - Part 1

Mistakes

I’ll write about how to create panoramas and some tips and tricks to take better panorama pictures. I’ll write about my first attempt to take panorama pictures and create a panorama. I believe writing my mistakes will help you to fix yours. I will also write the right way to take panorama pictures not only my mistakes (in the second part). An finally i will show how to stitch pictures, and softwares that can create panoramas by stitching pictures (in the third part).

When i first try taking pictures to create a panorama, i thought that “Ok this is easy i’ll just take the pictures one after another in a continuous line and stitch them in photoshop… That’s it”. Well i was wrong, I downloaded the pictures from my camera and open a wide enough file in photoshop to put them side by side than i noticed the color, contrast ans exposure differences between the pictures. They didn’t look like a single photograph, because of the contrast and color differences. I also saw that the horizontal lines does not fit each other, somehow they are not straight, if i make a building’s position fit to the same building’s position in the second picture, the other objects which are above or below the one that i fixed, doesn’t fit to the same objects in the second picture. And i didn’t know why. You can see the mistake that i did in my first attempt;

As you can see that images do not fit each other. My mistakes were;

• Using Semi-Auto Functions of my Camera (Tv) (Av)
• Using Auto Focus
• Using Wide-Angle Lens
• And Try stitching the pictures manually

Using Semi-Auto Functions of my Camera (Tv) (Av). Why it was a mistake?

It created the color and contrast differences between the pictures. Every time i moved my camera, it naturally measured different amounts of light and set new settings for it. So different shutter speeds and other settings caused the difference between photographs.

Using Auto Focus. Why it was a mistake?

Each time i moved the camera, camera focused to different points so i was unable to stitch the photographs with different focus points. Sometimes it is better to use manual focus.

Using Wide-Angle Lens. Why it was a mistake?

As the angle of lens gets wider deformation level at the edges of the picture increases. As i mentioned my earlier posts. “As angle gets bigger deformation level at the edges of picture increases, vertical and horizontal lines in the picture start to loose their straightness’ and look like curves.” To learn more about wide angle lenses and different types of lenses, see my previous post; Types of Lenses. Anyway, back to our subject, because of this deformation at the edges, i couldn’t match the objects in different pictures.

Try Stitching the Pictures Manually. Why it was a mistake?

Actually, it is not right to call that one mistake, it is more making the job harder rather than a mistake. And Imagine stitching my curvy, wide-angle shots with color differences, it was a disaster.

End of Part 1

Part 2 - Panoramic Photography - Tips and Tricks