Ultra-quick panoramas
In digital photography a panorama is an image that was made up by combining several smaller images. Usually these images are a horizontal sequence, but they can be made vertically as well or even combining multiple rows. The process of glueing them together is called "stitching" and is done in special software. While this may seem like a lot of work, it really is not. This article shows you how to make stunning panoramas in minutes, without the need for bulky tripods or expensive tools.
Making the images
Before you can stitch anything, you need images to stitch. To make panoramas you can use sturdy tripods with expensive panorama heads, but that takes a lot of time and gear and this article is called ultra-quick panoramas so we'll forego all that in favour of some quick steps.
- Look around. Examine your surroundings. Are there any foreground objects in any direction that may block part of your shot? If so, move to better position.
- Select a start and end point for your panorama
- Turn off auto-white balance if you have it on and set gradation to normal. If you're using a polarizing filter, take it off.
- Find a spot between the start and the end where the lighting is average (relative to the rest of the sequence). Aim at this spot and press and hold AEL
- Face the middle of your sequence and lean backwards a bit to put most of your weight on one leg and have the camera above this point as much as you can.
- Frame the start point of your sequence. Try not to move your leg.
- Take your first image while holding AEL
- Swivel around the leg you have your weight on to frame the next image. Make sure this frame overlaps at least 15-20% with the previous one. Keep holding AEL. try and keep the camera level whiel you rotate and keep the horizon line at the same height.
- Repeat step 8 until you reach the end
That's it, you now have all you need to create a stunning panorama later. This may seem like a lot of steps, but with a bit of practice you can do this really fast
Some extra tips:
- With the E-30 keep an eye on those level indicators in the viewfinder!
- You may want to half-press to focus somewhere and then switch to manual focus, that way you don't have to refocus on every image in the sequence.
- Consider holding your camera in portrait mode. You'll need more images to make your sequence, but your panoramas will look a lot less narrow.
- Don't use too wide an angle. Sure you'll need fewer images but the perspective distortion will mess up the stitching. I find 14mm works well in portrait mode and 17mm in landscape, but feel free to go beyond that.
Stitching the panorama with Microsoft ICE
Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) is a very easy to use, free panorama stitcher that gives very good results. You can get it here:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ICE/
Stitching with MS ICE couldn't be easier
- Start ICE
- Drag-and-drop your images onto it. Make sure you drag all of them at once (use shift and control to select multiple files)
- Wait
- You can now adjust parameters if you like: press the button in the toolbar ressembling a cube
- Drag the horizontal or vertical line to straighten the horizon if needed
- You can change the projection if you like, for the method we're using cylinder (horizontal) should be best.
- When you're done making adjustments, press apply and wait a bit
- You can now adjust the crop. By default ICE will crop so that the whole image is seen, and fill everything else with black. Press "automatic crop" to get the largest possible rectangle contained in the image.
- Adjust scale and jpeg compression as you see fit
- Click "export to disk" to save your panorama
- Wait some more
Stitching the panorama with Hugin
Hugin is another freeware panorama stitcher. It's a bit more advanced and harder to use than hugin, but has the advantage that it also runs on linux and mac machines.
Instructions for hugin to follow later (sorry)
Some results
The following are quick panoramas made using this technique and microsoft ICE (click to view full size):
