How to shoot and merge panoramic photos

Image copyright © 2007 Normanbolditalic. All rights reserved.
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You should notice by now I'm such a dramatic hopeless in creating post titles, but my SEO guru says that's good for the keywords, so leave it at that.

This is a panoramic shot of Washington Park I took in one of those weekdays when there's not much of a soul hanging around, except slacker families like us.

Unlike the good ol' days, when you have to shoot and cross your fingers while waiting for the film to develop, everything these digital days seem like, um, a walk in the park. Most digital cameras, even the point-and-shoot ones, have manual settings and everything can be "customized".

When facing a beautiful vista that just begs to be photographed, it pays to be patient. Even if you have the widest angle lens, you may not be able to capture it all in one frame. That scene will even be more captivating if you shoot it just after dawn or before sunset, when the the light is diffused and the shadows are soft. I read that most landscape photographers shoot exclusively during those times of the day.

My goal is to get everything right during the shooting process, so I won't have bigger problems when merging it in Photoshop later. This is assuming we're using a jpeg workflow. When shooting in RAW, some of the steps shown here might be redundant.

The basic idea is this: setting eveything right in your first frame, then proceeding to lock those settings throughout the next segments. In panoramic photography, there are no second chances halfway; you have to start over again if one of the segments veer away from focus or exposure. I assume you're quite familiar with your camera's manual modes already. If not, go ahead. It's never too late to read that manual.

Shooting the segments

1. First things first: horizon level and camera shake. Ideally you need to have a tripod with a double level (that green liquid-in-a-vial thingie that tells you the tripod is correctly levelled). If you didn't bring a tripod, lean yourself against a tree or a lampost, but this is really just winging it. If you're serious about your photography, you need to use that tripod.
2. Shoot in portrait even if it's gonna take more frames to shoot. So you will have the least edge distortion (barrel or pincushion). Okay, so I didn't shoot in portrait with mine above, because time was not exactly on my side.
3. Don't use Auto-WB (white balance) or you will likely have frames with different color temperatures. You can tweak it in Photoshop, but we're trying to keep post processing to the minimum here. You need to use Custom WB: you need a superwhite sturdy letter-sized cardsheet to determine that. Under your present lighting conditions, place it about a foot away from the camera, tilt it just upwards to avoid shadows, and zoom in to have it fill the frame. Take the shot, go to your Custom WB menu, set it to the image you just took. This will be an accurate measure of your current lighting conditions, something even a DSLR's preset settings cannot achieve perfectly. If you don't have that paper, you have no choice but to use a preset white balance, like Sunny or Cloudy, depending on your lighting conditions. Just don't use Auto WB.
   
4. Using Aperture priority shooting mode (Av), press your shutter button halfway to set your exposure and focus. Take note of the f-stop and shutter speed. Then switch to manual mode, and enter those settings. Switch to manual focus to lock your focus too. After this, you should not touch your lens at all while shooting the rest of the segments. If your camera supports it, lock the exposure after setting it. But I want to be sure, so I use Manual.
   
5. Use a wireless shutter release, to prevent shake when shooting. Or set your camera to self-timer (2 or 5 seconds).
6. On my first frame, I use an index card marked "1st" just to the leftmost side, and another card marked "last" on my last frame. Just so I have a visual cue where to start and end in post-processing later.
7. Shoot the next frames, overlapping each segment by at least 25%, so that Photoshop will have more image data to work on. If the scenery before you contains too many details, overlap more: 35 to 40%.
8. Shoot quickly, don't linger on any frame, especially if you're shooting the sky or part of it; clouds move fast, and they're one of the trickiest elements to stitch later.

Merging the photos

1. Open Photoshop, then open all your photo segments.
2. Under the File menu, scroll down to Automate, then choose Photomerge.
3. In the dialog box, from the Use pop-up menu, choose Open Files. Turn on the "Automatically Arrange Source Images", and then click OK.
4. Photomerge will then do its magic. If you see a seam between the segments, click OK anyway. Chances are, it's gone when you see the merged photo. If not, there's always the Clone Stamp tool (S).

If panoramas bore you, try panographies! Speaking of which, Photojojo is the best photo hobbyist site. Evar.