Sometimes life can’t be bounded by the constricting frame of a standard photo. Break out. With software accompanying most digital cameras these days, you can “stitch” a range of photos, with a little digital massaging, into one complete and nearly seamless frame. When planning to produce a panoramic image, keep a couple things in mind:
Because you’ll be taking these photos over successive frames, you’ll want motion in the image to be at a minimum. Taking a panorama, in say, New York’s Time Square, would probably mean that cars seen driving by in one frame won’t exist in the next. Scenes that are fairly big like a park, rather than the confines of a building work best. When shooting, find a constant line of reference to center your camera on throughout the range of your panorama.
One of the major factors to produce a good panorama, is having enough overlap in consecutive images to ease lining the images up later on. A good rule of thumb is to have one-half to one-third of each photo exist in the frame before it.
Even though lighting will vary from shot to shot, you’ll want to ensure that the images are uniformly exposed – let the camera take care of that for you. Its best if the sun or any other major light sources are not in the image. Focus on the primary subject of the image and turn the auto focus off so all the images are focused in the same range.
More panoramas:
