First Panorama

[Jamesfotos]

With the recent feature on the DPS home page about Panoramas I decided I would try one and see what I think. I used Hugin to stitch the 4 shots. I think it came out pretty good.

[Gulpa]

I think you've done a great job with stitching - I can't see where the images blend together.

Do you have levels on your tripod to help you with balancing the shooting angle when setting up? Also, I think it's good to set up the camera while looking at what will be the centre of your panorama, it's easy then to pan left or right to start shooting - that way your center piece will be best allinged.

Overall - you've done a great job for your first panorama.

[inkista]

I'm trying not to dogpile on here, as this is SYS, and not Critique. It's a great result for a first pano--the stitching is seamless and very nice, and I like the point of view and choice of scene--street corners rock for panos. And everybody makes these kinds of shooting errors early on--which is why we all know how to fix them.

The horizon is u-shaped because the overall point of view of the pano is pitched/tilted downwards (i.e., you shifted the camera up a bit on the middle shots), not perpendicular to the scene--the streetlights give it away. If you'd been pitched up, they'd be pointing out, not in. If you were perpendicular, they'd be straight up (well, assuming they're straight in real life).

You can deliberately do this if you want a fisheye effect in your final pano. But if you don't, keeping the horizon level and placed the same in all your frames is key. The trick I used to use was to balance the camera by its tripod hole on the tip of my thumb, and then just rotating the camera around that. As Gulpa mentions, bubble levels can help, too. But since I like shooting handheld, I tend to just over-cover the scene by shooting in portrait mode, or adding an extra row, so I can correct and have enough real estate to crop.

To correct it, load the finished pano back into Hugin, set the lens type as a cylindrical pano, set a few vertical control points, and restitch--the resulting pano will be curved, though. I'm weird; I think that can be fun, too.