CameraCrazy

Techniques to Improve Wide Angle Photographs

Panoramas are a great way of taking pictures, they illustrate a sense of vastness, provide strong detail to focus on and create some great effects, particularly with photos that extend to or past 180 degrees.

One of the great things about panoramas is that when done correctly they often look even better than if you were to purchase a super wide lens. Another great thing is that the detail involved with them supersedes wide angle shots. Consider this, with a super wide lens and a 6.0 mega-pixel camera your photograph will only retain 6.0 mega-pixels of detail. Not bad at all, but for the gear heads out there, creating a panorama using a normal lens and stitching together 4 shots, is effectively the equivalent of shooting a scene with a super-wide angle lens and a 24 mega-pixel camera. The trick is making sure you do it correctly so when you stitch your pictures together they appear seamless. In my experience the key to creating a good panorama is patience and a good setup.

The Setup

The first step in setting up for a panorama is to make sure you have a tripod that has been leveled. This seems pretty obvious, but often people get so excited about taking a picture or impatient they completely forget/ignore this step. Without a level tripod there is a good chance your panorama will angle towards the end leaving you with one side cutting off the top and the other other cutting the bottom. If your tripod has a ball head you will also want to make sure that is level. One simple way of doing this is to use a small level that you can pick up from a hardware store. Once you have leveled your tripod, DO a practice run and look through the lens while panning SLOWLY. Make sure the horizon is level and see how the landscape changes as you move from side to side. This is also likely the time to alter your focal length to either include or exclude details of the scene. Taking time to do a little preventative work will likely save a lot of time and frustration in in Photoshop later.

The Camera

The other important thing is to ensure the settings for each photograph of the panorama will be the same: Firstly, the lens you choose can be an important decision, we suggest against using wide angled lens (10-20mm). The distortion around the edges with wide angles can lead to alignment issues and noticeable unwanted shadows. Turn your camera to manual if you already haven’t, this lets you control the settings and makes sure not to end up with different depths of field, shutter speeds, ISO etc… Keeping the exposure constant is one of the more important things to do when making a panorama. This means your best off while panning to keep an eye on your camera’s light meter to make sure there is not too much of a dramatic difference so one of the photos in the panorama either isn’t blown out or too dark. If this happens to be the case, try and find a shutter speed that will be a good compromise between the different photographs of the scene. This likely will take some practice, but it’s worth it in particularly strong contrasting situations. Alternatively, and if you have the time, it may be worth choosing a different time of day or different type of light (e.g. overcast). Another important reason to keep your camera on manual focus when making a panorama is to ensure your focus doesn’t change. It’s likely the case and with many landscape shots that you will want a small aperture (high F-stop number) to capture lots of detail. The third camera setting to keep constant is less important if you shoot RAW, but very important if you shoot jpg. Make sure your white balance is not on auto and is set to one value. Auto White Balance can be very tricky. I once took two pictures within a minute of each other and they showed very different temperature values. In RAW if you forget this step, you can always change the white balance afterwards when you post process the images, but in jpg if your auto white balance changes as you pan the camera (which is likely for extended panoramas) your going to be out of luck. Turn off any other controls that your camera may automatically set (e.g. tonal contrast). Remember the key to making a good landscape picture is to make sure you have as much control as possible.

Taking the Photograph

Once the grunt work is complete ensuring your camera, tripod, exposure etc… are properly set the only the next step is to take the pictures. The first picture I take is not of the scene, but of my hand, why, well, in taking panorama pictures there have been multiple times where I ended up dumping the contents of my memory card onto my computer, let a few days pass and when I finally get around to sorting the pictures and deleting the bad shots, I usually end up tossing some if not all the panorama bound pictures. After all, separately they look like terribly composed pictures. By taking a picture of my hand at the beginning and end of the sequence, I know know where the panorama start and ends. There are four guidelines I try to follow when shooting the sequence: 1) This may seem redundant, but make sure you use the tripod to pan the camera (after all thats why you spent the time leveling it). It sounds stupid, but having a ball head on my tripod has led me more then once to unlock the head and move the camera. 2) Don’t waste too much time when shooting the sequence. I know there is an innate reaction in photographers to line up the next shot, make sure its all correct and then take the picture, but for panoramas this can often lead to changes in the scene. For example, clouds move and may get cut off at different spots, or light conditions can change fairly fast, like at sunrise, sunset or if a cloud blocks the sun. Trust yourself that your prep work will pay off. 3) When shooting each picture, overlay each shot by about 10% of the frame. This makes stitching the picture together much easier afterwards. 4) Unless your in a rush to go, shoot the panorama several times so you can later determine which sequence works best. After all when trying something new in photography, trial and error often works well.

Post Processing (Stitching)

There are a lot of ways to stitch a panorama together, Adobe Photoshop CS2 is my preference, there is an automated script that tries to line each photo. Sometimes it does a good job other times, you have to line them up by hand. After all the photos are lined up I like to clone noticeable lines that can appear from stitching. I also like to clone out distracting objects that can often show up when shooting such a wide amount of space, like people, telephone poles etc…

Multi-Level Panoramas

One final technique we’d like to discuss is multi-level panoramas. Normally, when we think about panoramic photographs, we think about a single row of shots that are stitched together. However, there are times when we encounter a scene that includes both breadth (left to right) as well as depth (up and down). On these occasions, one might consider doing a multilevel panorama: stitching together two or more rows of photographs. Traditionally, one would use a lot of equipment to put together a multi-level panorama that was free of perspective shifts and alignment errors (see photo below). Recently we discovered software that makes multi-level panoramas a simple matter of taking sufficient number of shots. The program Autostitch was developed in the AI labs at UBC and does an extremely remarkable job of assembling panoramas without much human assistance. The upside is that it’s completely free, the downside is at the moment it’s only available for PC users, Sorry to all the Apple people out there. To shoot a multi-level panorama the general techniques outlined above should still be followed, but a few additional points are worth mentioning. Once you’re finished shooting the first row, re-adjust your field of view to shoot similar panoramic rows above or below (or both) the original row of shots. Keep in mind that by adjusting the field of view to capture the depth of the image, your ball-head is no longer level. As a result, you will get accurate images (curved images). To correct for this, we suggest taking shots at least two frames beyond the start and stop points of the original row. We’ve also found it useful to take another row of shots above or below the added rows just to make sure we’ve got all the details we want in the scene. If you take too many pictures, it’s not a problem, you can always crop it out later. However, if you take too few, there may be missing areas in key positions of your composition. Once you have captured the images, batch process the RAW images (if you shot RAW) and convert them to JPEG. Try to ensure any adjustments you make are consistent for the entire set. As personal preference, we tend to keep the native resolution and save as high quality as possible. The next step is to input all the JPEG images into Autostitch. The program will run a quick assembly and present a low resolution proof image. Depending on how much of the scene you shot, and how many shots you took, there may be areas around the edge where a pure black area is inserted. Don’t be too concerned about this, you shot more than what you wanted to begin with anyways right? Autostitch allows you to rescale the image in program as well as control the output JPEG quality. Again, our tendency is to keep the native resolution and output as high quality as possible. If you’re satisfied with the proof, enter your output settings, sit back and let Autostitch do its job. A small warning, depending on the number of shots you took, and your output settings, Autostitch will draw a lot of computer power and it may take a while to finish assembling the photo. Once we have the finished image, we take that back into Photoshop and crop out the extra bits to restore our original composition.

Multi-level panoramas are not for every scene, and in fact, we would argue that relatively few instances would be well represented with a multi-level panorama. But, when you come across the scene that just screams for it, have confidence and shoot away!

Good Luck!