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Technique3 min read

LESSON 55

Panoramas

Wide views from several frames.

IN THIS LESSON

  1. What counts as a panorama
  2. Cameras and stitching
  3. Parallax and the pivot point
  4. In practice: shooting the frames

What counts as a panorama

A panorama is a picture with a horizontally stretched field of view. There is no strict line between a wide-angle picture and a panorama, and a fisheye frame is not a panorama just because it covers a lot. The source suggests that a view approaching the human eye's field, about 160 by 75 degrees, can be called panoramic, which usually means an aspect ratio of 2:1 or wider. Some panoramas run to 4:1 or even 10:1, and some cover a full 360 degrees. The idea is older than photography: painted panoramas filled whole buildings from 1787, and Daguerre worked on panoramas and dioramas before photography.

Cameras and stitching

Early photographers built special cameras. Joseph Puchberger patented a hand-cranked panoramic camera in Austria in 1843 with a 150 degree view, and Friedrich von Martens built a more successful one in 1844. Swing-lens cameras pivot the lens while a slit exposes a curved strip of film; rotating cameras can turn a full circle or more. Today most panoramas are stitched: several overlapping frames are combined by software. Stitching works best with nearly exact overlaps and identical exposures, and it has to deal with seams, lens distortion, things that moved between frames, and parallax.

Parallax and the pivot point

Parallax is the shift between near and far objects when the camera moves sideways. If you swing the camera around your body instead of around the lens, a near fence post and a far tree change places slightly from frame to frame, and the software cannot join them cleanly. To avoid it, the camera should turn about the centre of the lens's entrance pupil, often called the no-parallax point. For distant landscapes the error is small and a handheld panorama works. For interiors or scenes with close foregrounds, a panoramic head on a tripod that lets you slide the camera back to that point makes a clean result possible.

In practice: shooting the frames

This section is working practice. Level the tripod first, so the horizon does not climb across the set. Turn the camera to portrait orientation for more height. Set everything to manual: exposure from the brightest part, fixed white balance and manual focus, so frames match. Overlap each frame by a third or more. Shoot quickly if clouds or water are moving. Take one frame of your hand before and after the set, so you can find the sequence later. A slightly longer lens across more frames gives more detail than a wide lens in two.

Try it today

  1. 01Level a tripod and turn the camera upright.
  2. 02Set manual exposure, white balance and focus from the brightest part of the scene.
  3. 03Shoot six to ten frames with about a third overlap each.
  4. 04Stitch them in your editing software and look for seams near close objects.
  5. 05Repeat a scene with a near foreground, turning the camera around the lens rather than your body.