Handheld panorama of Punakha Dzong in Bhutan.
I love to take panoramic images and when I’ve planned a specific shot I will carry all of the gear: a heavy tripod, leveling base, panorama head with nodal slide, etc. However, many times, especially when traveling in foreign countries, bringing all of this equipment is infeasible because it weighs too much or takes up too much space (or you left it at your place of lodging).
If you are caught without your panning gear, it’s still possible to create high quality panoramas if the conditions are good. For example, the above panorama of Punakha Dzong in Bhutan was created from 8 handheld shots. Using AutoPano Pro, I combined the images to produce the final panorama. It turns out the hard part was not dealing with mis-alignments caused by hand holding but rather the cable with the pigeon was moving in the wind causing a break in the stitched picture. This would have a caused a problem even with a full panning setup and I dealt with it by manually cloning portions of the image to get the cable to line up.
Individual images comprising the Punakha Dzong panorama.
To maximize the chance of getting a successful stitch:
- Use proper camera holding technique.
- If you are using image stabilization, make sure to wait half a second for it to settle before moving on to the next picture in the series.
- If you have grid lines in the view finder, it helps to line them up with the horizon or another feature that you know is perfectly horizontal.
- Try to rotate around the nodal point as much as possible (basically rotate around the middle of the lens).
Generally hand held panoramas work best with the following conditions:
- There is bright light yielding fast shutter speeds.
- The subject is far away to minimize the impact of parallax errors.
- The photo is taken with a longer focal length lens.
Sometimes when I shoot handheld, Autopano Pro will fail to produce a good stitch of the image no matter how much I play with the program. To deal with this, I try to shoot the same scene several times so that at least one version will stitch cleanly without artifacts. For example, with the panorama of the Reichstagg shown below, I shot this same scene five times and three of the series had errors in stitching.
Handheld panorama of the Reichstag, Berlin, Germany. Composite of 6 images taken at 70mm f/10.
Handheld panorama of the Gallery of Kings on Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, France. Composite of 8 images taken at 135mm f/11.
Handheld panorama of the 108 Chorten at Dochula Pass, Bhutan. Composite of 7 images taken at 50mm f/10.
Handheld panorama of Old Town Square in Prague, Czech Republic. Composite of 5 images taken at 24mm f/11.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Stephen, I replied to one of your earlier posts following some research on the net about banner photo shots. To avoid stitching together just 2 photos (I need an aspect ratio of about 3:1) to create a website banner photo with a narrow depth of field, is there an affordable Canon lens I can purchase that allows me to crop top and bottom of the shot?
Any suggestions would be gratefully received, many thanks! The advantage is that I don’t need any clarity from the background, only the model I am shooting.
Steve — You should be able to achieve a panoramic image by simply cropping the top and bottom of your pictures and you can do this with any lens. The EOS 500D has a resolution of 4752 x 3168 and with cropping will yield a picture of 4752 x 1188 pixels (for a 4:1 ratio). While this will probably leave you with too few pixels for printing it should be more than sufficient for a website banner image.
In terms of having selective focus where the model is sharp but the background is blurred, you can achieve this in a number of ways:
(1) use a telephoto lens and shoot with it wide open at say f/2.8. Certain specialty lenses allow you to achieve even more shallow depth of field with larger apertures such as f/1.4. Your subject will be in focus but everything else will be blurred.
(2) use a tilt/shift lens and instead of tilting to increase DOF, tilt the lens in the opposite direction to get more shallow focus. Nikon also has two Defocus Control lenses that can achieve a similar effect
(3) Blur the background in postprocessing by creating a duplicate layer in photoshop, apply a blur filter and then uses layer masks to select the regions you want sharp. You can also do this by taking two pictures with the exact same framing with one in focus and the second purposely out of focus.