Panoramic landscape - any advice?

[Scatterbrain]

A friend has asked me to photograph a local castle. The location means a lot to her & she wants a large print for her living room.

I have reserached the location online & plan to take a drive out there for a quick recce tomorrow. But I think a panoramic landscape with the castle off to the side would work really well.

But...I haven't done a panoramic shot before & I'm not sure if I have the equipment. I understand you take a series of shots & stitch them together, but am struggling to understand any more than that as the tutorial I saw used spe******t equipment & photoshop.

Is it possible to create a reasonable panoramic shot using a Canon 400d, basic tripod and Photoshop Elements5? Do you need anything special about your tripod? Can I download [free?] software to help to stitch it together?

I would be greatful for any advice. Landscapes really aren't my strongpoint (I photograph children mainly), but I love to experiment so when she asked I thought it would be a good challenge.

Any advice?

[fletch]

Not sure about PSE 5 but you can definately do it easily with PSE 6 or 7, there are also loads of free open source tools available such as Hugin

These shots were all taken using my E510, handheld in portrait format. I simply rotated carefully around my feet and took care to move the camera in a constant horizontal plane. Make sure the camera is in maual mode and white balance and focus are all constant for all of the pictures or you will get stripey panormaics.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesfletcher/3404862639/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesfletcher/3339192600/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesfletcher/3338002903/

You don't need speciallist equipment (or a tripod at all) unless you are planning to shoot very complex panoramas with close foreground elements where you need to avoid paralax error.

[OsmosisStudios]

Autostitch?

Ive yet to try the adobe version that comes with some of the higher versions of PS, but autostitch is free and works rather well.

[dcclark]

I highly recommend hugin, mentioned above. It comes with an automatic control-point generator, which can be a great help if you don't want to do all of that alignment by hand. It also has exposure matching, just in case you messed up the exposure from frame to frame. I have used it many times quite successfully.

[cowlemon]

try autopano pro

[inkista]

Basic advice:

• Manual exposure settings, so you don't get varying exposures between shots.
• Manual focus, so your focus point doesn't shift between shots.
• Manual (non-auto) white balance setting, so you don't get color shift between shots. (Shooting RAW can also be helpful)
• Check your dynamic range, and consider bracketing for HDR.
• Err on the side of too much coverage vs. too little (i.e., shoot extra rows, and extra shots to cover more than you think you need). If your horizon's off, you'll need to rotate and crop--the more you cover, the more room you'll have to maneuver. Try to overlap at least a third of the frame between shots. Shooting multiple rows is good; shooting in portrait mode can help you get more vertical coverage if you're shooting a single row.
• Don't forget that you still have to compose the shot, even if it's a pano (check out Max Lyon's website)

You can probably shoot the panorama handheld without any problems, especially if there's nothing in the near foreground.

I'm also one of the Hugin proponents, and if you end up needing to do exposure blending as well as pano-stitching, Hugin can handle both simultaneously. Because you're covering a much wider view, it's easier to get the sun into the shot, and your dynamic range can get a lot bigger.

[zephod]

While I realize I am extemely green in this area I can say I absolutely love Windows Live Photo Gallery's panorama plug in. I've found premiere to be too clunky and unreliable personally. Inkista has the gist of it though.

• TRIPOD- As obvious as it sounds this is your best friend
• Shoot portrait not landscape - It's a lot more photo's but I feel like it's better coverage
• Take a notebook and graph paper, pencil and ruler. Since this is a big project set up your rule of thirds on the graph paper and create a plan. I'm not really that good at explaining but I'll try. Place the middle line of your thirds diagram on the horizon. Place the upper limit at least one full shot above the castle's highest point and the lower limit about equidistant. The reason for this is to have room to crop and edit down to your final product.
• Overlap - Once you have your shots planned out overlap them as you move ONLY the tripod's horizontal travel. As has been mentioned over shoot. The more shots you have the more choices you have when editing.

I have a few of my panorama's up on my flickr site. They definitely aren't as good as I hope to get but I am pretty proud of them. Remember when doing panorama's you have more than just the horizontal to work with. One of my pictures is of the largest Sequoia in Sequoia National park and consisted of 28 photos. (I'm between 150 and 200 yards away from the base of the tree here) http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3650/...be26d989_b.jpg

Hope that helps some.

Doug

[inkista]

Whether you need a tripod or not depends on a couple of factors:

• The number of "member" images you plan to use--after a certain point, if you think you might lose track, then a tripod (and possibly a panohead) are good tools to make sure you don't miss any coverage.
  
  
• If parallax becomes an obstacle to cleanly stitching. Then a tripod and panohead are vital to make sure you're rotating around the no-parallax point of the lens. This is usually only an issue if you have subjects that are near, like, say you're shooting a pano in the living room.

With far-off landscapes, I've been able to shoot a 9x3 grid of images handheld that successfully stitched into a pano.

[rahsoft]

manual focus or rather infinte focus
fixed iso preferably low as possible
fixed apeture, again go as low as you can rich detail and depth of field.
i use PS and it warns to ensure plenty of overlap.
some software will ask you to decide how to put it to together eg. curved perspective, collage etc
best to just put lots of multiple photos overlapping and come out with an irregular shaped photo. then you can crop it to a rectangular shape.

above all else, practice on some thing smal, back garden etc and play with the results to get a feel for how it should turn out.
and look on flickr

[Scatterbrain]

well...I've been there, I've taken the pictures & i'm about to process it. Wish me luck!