How to take panoramic photos with a DSLR
A panorama view of The Bund in Shanghai |
Most compact cameras will have the panorama photo creating feature built-in and some will have the feature to guide the taking of pre-panoramic photos to be stitch in a PC software tool. A DSLR camera generally takes better quality photos compare to a compact camera, but it does not have the feature to create panorama photos or guide you in taking the pre-panoramic photos. This blog post will show you how to setup your DSLR and take the pre-panoramic photos that to be stitch using a panorama photo stitcher software tool in a PC.
Setting Up
- Switch to Manual mode.
- Set your aperture to around f5.6 to f8.
- Set your ISO appropriately according to your lighting.
- Meter your scenery from left to right to get a good shutter speed (that will get you a good exposure from left to right).
- If you are taking the pre-panoramic photos handheld, please be mindful of your minimum shutter speed you can use handheld.
- Find an object that is far away but not infinity.
- Get a focus on that object.
- Fixed the focus or switch off the auto focus.
Start Shooting
- Shoot the first photo from your left.
- Usually many like to take landscape oriented photos for panoramic stitching. That will get you a very horizontally long panorama photo. Portrait oriented photos will also gives you good result, but at least the panorama photo does not look so long.
- Move your camera to your right and overlapping at least 30% of the first photo, shoot the second photo.
- Using your built-in focus points in your DSLR, level your horizontal line between your first and second photo.
- To get about 30% overlapping of your second photo to your first photo, use the built-in focus points in your DSLR to guide you as well.
- You can shoot the photos without a tripod, but it is recommended.
- Try to avoid a scenery with close foreground objects as this will create parallax error in your panorama photo after stitching.
- Shoot the consecutive overlapping photos to your right until you are satisfied.
Example how parallax error look like |
Example pre-panoramic shots |
Stitching The Photos
- There are many free and commercial panorama stitchers in the market. I am using Hugin Panorama Photo Stitcher to stitch all my panoramic photos.
- Refer to their tutorial section on how to use the software tool to help you stitch your panoramic photos.
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