I'm a British software developer and photographer living in Vancouver, BC. I mainly photograph landscapes, cityscapes, night scenes, and water.
If you're interested in any...
Super clarity and lovely, unusual color in the layered sky. You do have some wonderful subjects in Vancouver, and you do wonderful things with them. In my younger days, I would have loved to ski down the mountain though the trees. Must have been on a tripod at this exposure, right?
@frankhymus Yes, this was on a tripod -- only 4 photos I have uploaded here were not taken on a tripod.
This is actually a 30-photo panorama (cropped a bit at the bottom) so there is lots and lots of detail -- but it turns out that it's not that interesting to zoom into a mountain, so I resized it back to a more 'normal' size after stitching. The process has made it scarily sharp though!
@jonesp Thanks! I'm not sure I've ever explained the in-camera setup per-se, but there's not much to it for the photos I take.
If you are doing panoramas with objects close to the camera and far from the camera, you need a panoramic head -- this allows the camera to rotate around the 'nodal point' of the lens, and prevents parallax errors (where the nearby objects obscure different parts of the distant objects as you rotate the camera). If you have parallax errors you can pretty much throw away any hope of getting a seam-free stitch.
But for landscape photos like this, where everything is a long way from the camera, it's very difficult to introduce noticeable parallax errors, even if you shoot the individual frames by hand rather than from a tripod. Certainly with a normal tripod you'll be fine in situations like this.
The first step is to get a fixed exposure (even if you are doing an HDR panorama, you want your base exposure to remain the same over all your shots). Obviously the idea is to get an exposure (or set of bracketed exposures) that will not blow the highlights in the bright parts of the image, and not crush the shadows in the dark parts. The easiest way to do this is to determine the exposure using a wide-angle lens, taking in the entire planned panorama area in a single frame. You can then tune the exposure here before swapping to a telephoto lens (or zooming in, if you are using a general-purpose lens).
Then it's simply a case of taking the shots. I aim to leave at least 1/5th of a frame overlap between photos, but if in doubt, more is better than less -- there's nothing more disappointing than taking an awesome panorama, going to stitch it, and realising you've missed a thin strip right in the middle! If you're taking a 2D panorama (i.e. shots that will form a grid, rather than just a horizontal or vertical line, as was the case in this photo), then you need to keep the grid pattern in your head -- start at one corner, work across counting the shots until you reach the opposite corner, move up/down, count back the other way, and so on.
That's pretty much it for in-camera work. If you are shooting several consecutive panoramas, particularly of the same subject, it can be useful to mark where one set ends and the next begins (a photo with the lens cap on is the traditional method, although there are plenty of others!)
For processing, I personally use Hugin, an open-source software package that is extremely powerful but easy to get started with. I convert the RAW files into 16-bit TIFF images -- at this point I will determine a white balance setting, apply CA correction if necessary, and apply light noise reduction. I don't do too much processing at this time -- by working in 16-bit TIFF I keep almost all the RAW data so that I can work on the final stitched image with much the same flexibility. Don't bother to correct lens distortion -- the stitching will fix distortion as part of the process, and every additional warp operation performed on an image reduces sharpness.
After processing in Hugin or your preferred panorama stitcher (making sure to keep the output as a 16-bit TIFF as well) it's back into Photoshop. I have Photoshop set to open TIFF files in Adobe Camera Raw, so I can work on the stitched image in the exact same way as a RAW file (except much slower, as it's typically a pretty huge image). I'll do exposure, contrast, saturation, highlight and shadow corrections at this point, as well as sharpening -- it's much easier to do this on the whole image than on small segments. Then it's into Photoshop for any final touches.
It seems like a lot when written down, but it's a fairly easy process once you get used to it. For a shot like this it took me under 5 minutes to take the 30 photos, and about a further 20-30 minutes processing/stitching.
Wow Alexis! Thanks for all this great info. I plan to test this out all really soon. I'm downloading Hugin right now.
The exposure tip was great. Do you not find that shots at sunrise or sunset are difficult as the light is changing so quickly?
I assume HDR panoramas are basically the same, but with the brackets taken during the shoot and the HDR processing done before you go into Hugin right?
January 13th, 2013
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Fav!
This is actually a 30-photo panorama (cropped a bit at the bottom) so there is lots and lots of detail -- but it turns out that it's not that interesting to zoom into a mountain, so I resized it back to a more 'normal' size after stitching. The process has made it scarily sharp though!
Amazing shot btw, looks extremely sharp.
If you are doing panoramas with objects close to the camera and far from the camera, you need a panoramic head -- this allows the camera to rotate around the 'nodal point' of the lens, and prevents parallax errors (where the nearby objects obscure different parts of the distant objects as you rotate the camera). If you have parallax errors you can pretty much throw away any hope of getting a seam-free stitch.
But for landscape photos like this, where everything is a long way from the camera, it's very difficult to introduce noticeable parallax errors, even if you shoot the individual frames by hand rather than from a tripod. Certainly with a normal tripod you'll be fine in situations like this.
The first step is to get a fixed exposure (even if you are doing an HDR panorama, you want your base exposure to remain the same over all your shots). Obviously the idea is to get an exposure (or set of bracketed exposures) that will not blow the highlights in the bright parts of the image, and not crush the shadows in the dark parts. The easiest way to do this is to determine the exposure using a wide-angle lens, taking in the entire planned panorama area in a single frame. You can then tune the exposure here before swapping to a telephoto lens (or zooming in, if you are using a general-purpose lens).
Then it's simply a case of taking the shots. I aim to leave at least 1/5th of a frame overlap between photos, but if in doubt, more is better than less -- there's nothing more disappointing than taking an awesome panorama, going to stitch it, and realising you've missed a thin strip right in the middle! If you're taking a 2D panorama (i.e. shots that will form a grid, rather than just a horizontal or vertical line, as was the case in this photo), then you need to keep the grid pattern in your head -- start at one corner, work across counting the shots until you reach the opposite corner, move up/down, count back the other way, and so on.
That's pretty much it for in-camera work. If you are shooting several consecutive panoramas, particularly of the same subject, it can be useful to mark where one set ends and the next begins (a photo with the lens cap on is the traditional method, although there are plenty of others!)
For processing, I personally use Hugin, an open-source software package that is extremely powerful but easy to get started with. I convert the RAW files into 16-bit TIFF images -- at this point I will determine a white balance setting, apply CA correction if necessary, and apply light noise reduction. I don't do too much processing at this time -- by working in 16-bit TIFF I keep almost all the RAW data so that I can work on the final stitched image with much the same flexibility. Don't bother to correct lens distortion -- the stitching will fix distortion as part of the process, and every additional warp operation performed on an image reduces sharpness.
After processing in Hugin or your preferred panorama stitcher (making sure to keep the output as a 16-bit TIFF as well) it's back into Photoshop. I have Photoshop set to open TIFF files in Adobe Camera Raw, so I can work on the stitched image in the exact same way as a RAW file (except much slower, as it's typically a pretty huge image). I'll do exposure, contrast, saturation, highlight and shadow corrections at this point, as well as sharpening -- it's much easier to do this on the whole image than on small segments. Then it's into Photoshop for any final touches.
It seems like a lot when written down, but it's a fairly easy process once you get used to it. For a shot like this it took me under 5 minutes to take the 30 photos, and about a further 20-30 minutes processing/stitching.
Let me know if you have any questions :)
The exposure tip was great. Do you not find that shots at sunrise or sunset are difficult as the light is changing so quickly?
I assume HDR panoramas are basically the same, but with the brackets taken during the shoot and the HDR processing done before you go into Hugin right?