How does one shoot panoramic pictures?
By rameshn
@rameshn (68)
India
January 5, 2009 12:00am CST
There are times when I have missed capturing the whole wide expanse of nature using my camera. Once when I was in the Himalayas, near Shimla actually, I stayed at a hotel that overlooked a valley. Stepping onto the balcony, we could get a feeling of being suspended over a valley with nothing obstructing us.
I shot a complete roll of film (these were 1 megapixel camera days) and when I saw the actual pictures, it looked like I had to join about a dozen such pictures end-to-end to get the effect of what we had seen.
How does one shoot panoramic pictures?
1 response
@Davidarich (985)
• Australia
6 Jan 09
The idea is right, the execution is not that hard using digital.
Take a number of photos which overlap by about 1/3; be careful to keep the horizon level and at the same point in the photos ( a tripod is a help). About 3 pictures, perhaps 4, makes a reasonable panorama. More images makes the picture too long relative to the height. If you hold the camera vertical you often get a better result.
Open a new document in Photoshop, Paintshoppro etc and make the canvas about 3x (of 4x etc) longer than wide. Import each photo into a separate layer (open each image, select edit/copy then close it, and in the panorama doc, Edit/Paste/Paste as New Layer).
Now line up each image, merge them and crop.
Those are the basics, but there is some very good software that will do all this or you, some of it free.
Serif Panorama Plus is very good, and is based on a free program called autostitch (do a search for it).
For a details walk through, read my Intel at www.qassia.com/making-panoramas-and-virtual-tours
