The ultimate guide to panoramic photography

The creation of panoramic photography has seen quite a surge in popularity in recent years, largely due to improvements in technology and software to make it possible. 

The process can be beneficial in several photographic genres, especially landscape photography. Still, there are plenty of pitfalls that make it not always easy and which ensure that success is only sometimes guaranteed. 

Here you'll find the main steps towards creating fantastic panoramic images, starting with the photography itself, and finishing with the in-computer processing needed to create the final image. 

The techniques described here are for use with a DSLR or mirrorless camera and don't apply to the automatic panoramic feature found in many phone cameras.

Once you've read this, you should be all set to take some fantastic panoramic shots!

 

What is panoramic photography?

Panoramic photography is the creation of images that usually have an extended rectangular shape, relatively wider than the usual 35mm-type format image we normally get from photography. 

Panoramic shots can be created simply by cropping a single standard horizontally framed image, taking a slice off the top and bottom of the image. 

However, the more usual method, and one which yields true panoramic images, involves shooting a series of sequential, overlapping images in a sweep across a view and then assembling them into a single image in the computer. 

The advantage of the first method is that it is simple and quick and requires no special skill. The downside, however, is that a lot of pixel data is thrown away, resulting in an image file significantly smaller than the original standard image. 

On the other hand, the 'full' panoramic technique—because it results from a combination of images—is significantly larger than a single image could ever be, often five to six times larger, hugely increasing its scope for use.

Furthermore, capturing a view in a series of overlapping images will usually make it possible to encapsulate in a single panoramic a much wider view than could ever be possible for a single image, regardless of the type of lens used. 

Before digital photography was developed, you could only achieve panoramic photography through the use of film in a specially designed (and hence rather expensive) camera dedicated purely to panoramic shots. 

In recent years, however, post-photography processing software has improved so much that you can assemble a series of images shot on a standard digital camera into a flawless panoramic image in which it is impossible to see 'the joins'. It has become a single image for all intents and purposes, rendering dedicated panoramic cameras redundant.

 

Basic in-camera techniques

The first step in panoramic photography is identifying scenes that lend themselves to this format. 

Not all scenes work well, but typically those that are long (as in left-to-right) and perhaps low-lying, at least relative to their left-right length, creating a long, 'rectangular' kind of overall composition, are the classic panoramic subjects.

Having identified your scene, you can then line up the camera and take a sequence of overlapping images, panning the camera from left to right or vice versa.

The first impulse in doing this is often to hold the camera in the horizontal position. Many novices start their panoramic life this way, but it has several drawbacks.

Firstly, it is better to hold the camera vertically. Holding the camera horizontally ensures that the vertical height of the final image will be quite limited, something that can become even worse if slight misalignments of successive images result in the need for significant cropping of the final panoramic. 

Secondly, hand-holding the camera almost guarantees there will be misalignments between successive images, increasing the amount of final stage cropping. 

It is also very hard to hold the camera perfectly level throughout a series of successive shots, resulting in such issues as horizons sloping at slightly different angles in each image.

At best, corrections will have to be made to each image post-photography before attempting to merge them. At worst, the software may need help to merge the images into a sensible panoramic.

So, always shoot your panoramic base images with the camera held vertically to maximise the image height. Doing this will mean you'll need to take more images in your sweep across the scene, but that is fine. 

If you feel you have to hold the camera, make sure it (and hence any horizon) is level before you take each successive shot. Better still, mount the camera vertically on a tripod. 

When doing this, ensure the tripod itself and its head are level, and that the camera is completely level on its mount. Once set up, it should be possible to rotate the camera across the scene without it budging even one degree from the level. 

Having your camera set up and ready to go, go through the following steps.

1. Use a lens with a focal length of no less than about 35mm. Using a shorter focal length lens (and hence with a wider angle of view) than this is likely to result in distortion in the corners of each image, making it hard for the computer software to subsequently merge the images accurately.

2. Set the focus point to the part of the scene where you want it to be, and then turn the autofocus off. The camera will now keep the focus at the same distance through every image in the sequence.

3. Measure the lighting and the exposure somewhere in the middle of the scene, ensuring the camera is in shutter-priority or aperture-priority mode. Then switch the camera to manual and manually set the measured lens aperture and shutter speed. The camera will now shoot the same exposure for every image.

4. Do a series of practice sweeps to ensure everything is lined up correctly. Make sure to include extra space left and right, and top and bottom, to allow for cropping of the final image.

5. Execute your sweep of images, with about a 30% overlap between each successive image. This ensures the computer has plenty of duplicate material to match up when working out how to merge the images.

You can shoot in either Jpeg or Raw formats.

 

Objects near and far

The method described above works well for subjects where everything is at an optical infinity distance from the camera. In other words, everything is more than about 30 metres away. 

When you start photographing subjects with elements closer than this—they create a foreground—you may have to work in a rather more exacting way. 

The problem is that as the camera rotates around either the tripod head or your body (if you're holding the camera), the relative juxtapositions of elements in the foreground change. 

This means that objects close to the camera will be in slightly different positions relative to each other in each successive image of your sequence. This is called parallax error, and it can create serious problems for the panoramic software, making it difficult for it to stitch the images together.

The solution is to work on how the lens—not the camera body—rotates. In the method described in the last section, the lens rotates around the camera if mounted on a tripod directly above the tripod head, or around you if you're holding it. 

You must mount the camera on a tripod to remove the parallax error and rotate the lens-camera combination around the lens's nodal point. 

This is the optical centre of the lens, not necessarily the physical centre. It requires the lens-camera combination to be mounted on a sliding rail to slide the whole lot back and forth to have the right point of the lens directly above the rotating centre of the tripod head. 

Every lens has its own nodal point. Before starting any panoramic photography that includes elements in a foreground less than 30 metres away, you'll need to experiment to establish the nodal point for each lens you are likely to use. 

As already mentioned, when a lens rotates around a point that is not its nodal point, the relative positions of nearby elements in the scene will change. 

Once you've moved the lens-camera combination back on the rail to the right spot, all those nearby elements in the foreground will stay in one position no matter how much you rotate the camera. You've found the nodal point! 

If all this sounds way too complicated and time-consuming, I sympathise. It is perfectly possible to concentrate on shooting only views with no foreground elements where the entire scene is more than 30 metres away. 

Furthermore, as panoramic software continuously improves, it is worth experimenting to see whether it copes with parallax error and then stitches the images together correctly without all the nodal point hassle!

 

Post-photography image processing

The post-photography processing of the images is now quite straightforward, thanks to huge advances in the software. 

The method described here assumes Adobe Photoshop (with or without Lightroom), though other image processing programs also have panoramic software. 

The first step is downloading the images from the camera to a computer and then preparing them. 

You'll need to convert the images to Tiff or Jpeg format if you shot in Raw format. If you make any changes to the images, such as colour temperature, contrast, saturation, sharpening etc., make the same changes to all the images. 

To do this, select one of the images—probably one in the middle of the sequence—make the desired changes to that image, and then apply the changes in one go to all the images. 

If you shot the images in Jpeg, you may not need to make any changes, but if you do, then again, make sure you apply the same changes to every image.

To start the process in Photoshop, click on 'File' (top left of the screen), then in the dropdown menu 'Automate', then 'Photomerge'. This will open the Photomerge dialogue box. 

Click 'Browse', find your image sequence on the computer, and select them. They will now appear listed in the dialogue box. You can use either Tiff or Jpeg images.

On the left of the dialogue box is a list of different styles of Photomerge. Just stick with the default 'Auto'. At the bottom of the box are several tick boxes. The only one that must be ticked is 'Blend Images Together'. 

You should also tick 'Vignette Removal' as this will remove any darkening that might be present in the corners of each image. 'Content Aware Fill Transparent Areas' can also be useful. 

In merging the images, there will always be a little mismatching, resulting in a ragged edge to the assembling panoramic and some empty peripheral blank areas. 

Ticking this latter box tells the software to fill these blank patches with what it believes would be appropriate, and since such peripheral areas are often sky, grass or rock, it more often than not does a good job.

Once you've made your selections, hit 'OK' and sit back. 

The photo merging/panoramic assembly can take some time, depending on the number of images, file sizes and the power of your computer. Eventually, it'll produce a draft image, in which all the separate images can be seen as components of the final panoramic, each arranged in a separate layer. 

Often you can see 'cracks' where the separate image components meet, and unless you ticked 'Content Aware Fill Transparent Areas', the edges of the panoramic will appear quite ragged. 

If you're happy with the general appearance of this draft image, flatten the layers into a single background layer by clicking on 'Layer', then 'Flatten Image'. 

This will flatten all those image components into a single layer, making any white 'cracks' disappear. The final job is to crop off the panoramic's ragged edges. 

Congratulations! You've finished processing your first panoramic image. 

 

This blog was written by Nigel Hicks, a hugely experienced Devon-based professional photographer. Nigel works with the USA's prestigious National Geographic Image Collection, among many other bodies, and is a Fellow of the British Institute of Professional Photography.

Nigel Hicks runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these go to www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work, feel free to take a tour of the website at www.nigelhicks.com.

 

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