Panoramas?

[Vance]

Hello I was wondering how to do panoramas. I dont even know how to shoot them from the camera. I know your supposed to take the pictures and stich them togather, but Idont know how to take the picturres. Just take them like in a sweeping motion?

The nonce you do get the images what software can I use to do this I am currently using Picas 3.

[Nathan deGargoyle]

This might help .

[samhail]

I have found that the easiest way to shoot a panorama is to use a tripod and to try to have no moving objects in the photo. Place your camera on the tripod and then focus and then make your settings. If you use auto focus for this then once you are finished turn it off and shoot in manual. Then you can either shoot a number of shots and pan the camera for each one while staying in one spot with the tripod or you can move the tripod in a straight line to the left or right and take your shots. If you have moving objects in the shot then it makes it more difficult to stitch the photos together using your preferred editing software. However, it is not impossible.
I would say the most important thing is to shoot each picture using the same settings (f/stop ect). Otherwise editing is nearly impossible.
I used photoshop elements for this photo. I am not familiar with Picas 3 so I can't help you with that. I did learn the hard way that I should have used a tripod. I had to do a lot of editing to stitch it together. If I remember correctly I stitched four photos together.

[inkista]

Yes, you can just rotate the camera to take pictures. Try to keep the camera in the same place. When I shot with a P&S, I tended to put the tripod hole on my left thumb, and spun it around that. Keep an eye on whether you're staying level with the horizon. You don't really need a tripod if there are no nearby objects you want in the panorama.

Shooting in Manual mode to lock the exposure, manual focus to lock the focus point, and with a non-auto white balance to lock the color temperature are also good ideas.

You want to overlap the frames by about a third. The overlap eliminates the possibility of missing coverage, and can help you erase moving objects/people in the shots--if they're in the overlap areas, if one shot has them and the other shot doesn't, you can use masks/layers to choose one or the other to eliminate ghosts and clones.

It's a good idea to cover more of the image you want than less--chances are good after you're stitching that you may have to rotate to straighten the horizon, or that the distortion needed to make the photos fit will require you to crop the pano. Having more coverage gives you more image to work with. Multiple rows is not a bad idea, or shooting with the camera in portrait mode to get more vertical coverage.

For stitching, depending on what kind of pano you're shooting and how much control over it you want, you can use a free push-button solution like Autostitch (or if you have a Canon camera, Photostitch which came on the CD that came with the camera), or a more sophisticated stitcher, like Hugin.

The main steps of stitching involve loading the images into the stitcher, arranging them, (in the case of Hugin, picking control points) and then stitching. From there, you can open the panorama in an editor, like Picasa or the Gimp, and adjust color/contrast, etc.