How do you take a panoramic photo?

Saturday 30 December 2017, 13:31 by Bernard Veerman | 11,139 views | 18 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Well, to explain how to take one, it is probably better to first explain what a panoramic photo actually is. Searching the internet for the word 'panorama' produces a variety of descriptions.

It is often about landscapes, seascapes and what you see from a mountain. It is not particularly clear-cut, but all the descriptions have 'wide' in common, indicating that width is an important aspect.

In my own words, I would think of it as: an image that cannot be captured in a single photo in terms of width. This does not have to be limited to the subjects mentioned above, but could also be a cityscape or harbour view, for example.

In technical terms, it is about the difference in human vision, which can be 150° to 180°. This immediately shows how it relates to a (standard) photographic lens.

A standard 50mm lens on a full frame camera has a field of view of approximately 45°. It is therefore not possible to capture the entire 'panorama' in a single shot.

How do you take a panoramic photo?

This may be a bit simplistic, but this is what it comes down to: take several photos in a horizontal movement and join them together. This sounds simple, but that is all there is to it. The technique for taking a panoramic photo is a little more technical.

Questions that arise are: how do I overlap the photos, how do I join the photos together, how do I prevent visible seams, how many photos do I need and how should I set up my camera?

To achieve a good spread for the panorama, I start with a view of 150° to 180° and prefer to take at least 5 photos. The trick is to keep the camera vertical and take the 5 photos in one smooth movement, in steps of 30°.

The shots then overlap each other to a considerable extent. The computer programme uses this to eventually create one panoramic photo. Some tripod heads have a degree scale, which makes things easier.

Shooting handheld is quite manageable, but it requires a little practice and a good computer programme for joining the photos together.

Camera settings

Just as with baking a cake, there are several recipes. In the end, you will bake the cake that best suits your own interpretation of the recipe. When I want to make a panorama, I do the following:

• If possible, I put the camera on a tripod;
• Tilt the camera so that it is “vertical”;
• On my full frame camera, I use a 50mm lens or a zoom lens set to approximately 50mm;
• For a panoramic photo with a field of view of 150° to 180°, I try to determine a good composition in steps of approximately 30°;
• Set the exposure metering to an average exposure;
• Autofocus must be switched off, and I focus manually once on the 'middle' photo;
• Choose a small aperture, f/11 or f/16. This depends on the performance of the lens, but is mainly related to depth of field;
• ISO as low as possible, preferably fixed at 100.

The photos should be exposed as evenly as possible. You can achieve this by fixing the aperture.

The light may vary slightly from shot to shot, but because the aperture is set (and cannot change), the camera's exposure metering will adjust the shutter speed. This produces a well-exposed panoramic photo when the images are joined together.

Taking the photos

If you take a panoramic photo of a landscape or seascape, for example, the distance to the subject is practically the same in all the photos. One or two metres at a distance of 50 metres is negligible. The result is a beautiful, wide 'distant view'.

If, on the other hand, you take a panoramic photo of a city, the difference in distance between the first, last and middle photo will be significant.

At the far left and right, this could be 50 metres, for example, while the middle photo is taken from approximately 20 metres away. This results in a 'cylinder'-like photo.

It looks a little like a shot taken with an ultra-wide-angle or fisheye lens. The computer programme can adjust the 'projection' of the shot slightly and reduce this effect.

Joining the photos into a panoramic photo

So far, I have kept talking about joining the photos together. This actually comes from the days when a panoramic photo was literally stuck together. A stack of photos was neatly and precisely cut out and glued together to form a panorama.

In the digital age, the cutting and pasting is done with a computer programme that “stitches” the photos together. We call this 'stitching', which means sewing. The parallel with sewing goes even further, because the places where the photos are “stitched” together are called 'seams', the English word for 'naad'.

As with many computer applications, there are also quite a few computer programmes on the market for stitching a panoramic photo, for example:

• ICE (Image Composite Editor) from Microsoft (free, but only for Windows);
• Autopano (not cheap, but very good);
• Photoshop and Lightroom, in the newer versions;
• PhotoStitch, supplied with a Canon EOS camera;
• Autostitch, with a free demo;
• PTGUI (contains the same core as Autopano, but is cheaper).

It is a matter of trying things out, or looking at someone else's work, and seeing which computer programme suits you and your wallet best.

Points to consider

The finest panoramic photos are made when nothing is moving and everything is static. The panoramic photo is created from several shots taken shortly after one another, in which moving subjects have changed position.

In practice, this means you need to pay attention in the following situations:

• Moving subjects such as people, bicycles, cars, boats and aeroplanes;
• Rippling water;
• Clouds moving past;

To put the theory in this article into practice, I will add a few examples.

Example one: Honfleur

After stitching, a bit of touching up with the 'Photos' programme gives this result
The cylindrical effect is clearly visible in the panoramic photo of the harbour of Honfleur. This is because the distance between the left and right sides of the photo is considerably greater than the distance to the quay, somewhere in the middle of the photo.

In the panoramic photo of the château of Tourville-sur-Arques, the distance on the left, in the middle and on the right is almost the same. The result is a beautiful distant view without cylindrical distortion.

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