5 Tips that will Dramatically Improve Your Panoramas
On location techniques that will have you creating professional quality panoramas without spending thousands on specialized equipment.
The panorama, one of the most impressive and awe-inspiring ways to present a landscape. There’s nothing quite like a photograph that seemingly wraps around a sprawling landscape while being shown in one plane, all in front of you. The awe-inspiring nature of this type of photography has led the majority of world-renowned landscape photographers to produce a collection of panoramics (most notably, Peter Lik). While the thought of capturing world-class panoramas may seem daunting, I’m going to walk through a few tips that will dramatically improve the way you create panoramas. These tips will help you produce professional-quality panoramas, without the use of thousands of dollars of professional panorama-specific equipment (like panorama tripod heads and things like that). Before I dive into my 5 favorite tips I want to walk through a few technical and stylistic aspects relating to panoramas.
Panoramas and Printing
Just a second ago I was talking about how panoramas are an impressive way to present a landscape. I believe that panoramas are one of the greatest ways to display a photograph in a space. The slightly elongated nature of panoramas often nicely compliments larger walls or spaces above longer pieces of furniture like couches. It’s also important to remember that a panorama can be vertical, and fit quite nicely in spaces that more traditional prints (aspect ratios of 2:3) might not work. Another reason to love panoramas and their print capabilities is for their resolution. Panoramas are typically extremely high resolution and make for world-class large format prints. The resolution of panoramas brings me to an important point. With high-resolution cameras today it is not uncommon to create a panorama-type image by cropping to a 2:1 aspect ratio. This creates a very modern look, again still great for printing and display because of the capabilities of modern digital cameras. However, in this article I want to focus more on the higher resolution, multiple image panoramas, generally displayed as a 3:1 or 4:1. This topic of panoramas and printing deserves its own article, but for now, I’m going to leave it at that so we can move on.
Creating a Panorama by Post-Processing
So now that we have just discussed that we are interested in the high-resolution 3:1 and 4:1 panoramas, it makes sense that we should know how those are created. It might seem strange that I’m going to start at the end, but I think it’s important to get this part out of the way so that we all have a better understanding of the panoramic process that is going to take place. In the field you will capture multiple images of a landscape, panning slightly after each shot so that there is some overlap between images. Once you get home you’re going to import the images into Lightroom. Before you even begin editing the images you are going to select all of them (4, 5, 6, 7, or however many images you took for your panorama), right-click, and select photo merge. Play around with the panoramic merge type until it looks how you would like it to. Super simple, the software does all of the heavy liftings. I just felt that it was important for you to be prepared to use some sort of editing software to bring your panorama together.
Alright, so we now understand the appeal of panoramas and why we would want to capture a landscape in this format. We also understand how we are going to bring everything together in post-processing. Now it’s time to look at the 5 tips that will dramatically improve your panoramas.
Lock Your White Balance
When I was first getting into photography I was told not to worry about white balance because it can be fixed in post. I’ve also seen countless well-known photography YouTubers say not to worry about white balance because if you shoot in RAW it can be fixed in post. I went back and forth on this for a while, but as I’ve progressed in my photography career I’m a firm believer that it is worth taking the time to get it right in the field. This notion of getting it right in the field couldn’t be truer than when shooting panoramas. I’m going to walk through the importance of manually setting your white balance with a common problem/example.
The best time for landscape photography is often at sunrise or sunset. At these times the light is often rapidly changing, or we are often in low light scenarios. In either case, our fancy cameras have a difficult time judging the white balance of the scene when set to auto white balance. So, it’s entirely possible to take a 6 shot horizontal panorama and end up with three of the shots with a very cool tone and the other three with a very warm tone. This makes stitching the images together in post much more challenging than it needs to be. The solution, lock in your white balance before you take the shot and you’ll ensure that the temperature of the images is consistent.
Manual Focus, Always
As I’ve just discussed locking your white balance, it’s also important to manually lock in your focus. As a brief side note here, I always recommend manually focusing. Autofocus is usually great and will get you close, but to get the sharpest possible images it’s a good idea to manually tweak the focus. Anyways, focusing for panoramas is extremely important. In autofocus, the camera will focus for every shot and this will create some seriously strange results with the stitched panorama and multiple focus points. The best technique is to picture the composition in your head. Imagine the aspect ratio of the panorama and where you would like the elements to be positioned. Decide on the star/subject of the image, and make a focusing decision based on that. Ensure the camera is focused manually, and take the shots needed for the panorama. This will create a seamless stitch in post and create a realistic-looking depth of field.
Keep Things Level
The final output of a panorama is a perfectly level, horizontal, or vertical rectangle. This means that if your images do not stitch together as a perfect rectangle, then they must be cropped to achieve this output. Imagine you took the images with your camera pointed at an extreme downward angle as you panned horizontally. This will create what I like to call, ‘the rainbow of unfortunateness.’ Your images will stitch together in a large arc, and when you try and crop it into a rectangle you’ll end up with a tiny little image, probably making the panorama completely useless. Or maybe this time you’ve leveled your camera better, but the tripod plate is completely off level. You’ve now created the ‘staircase of doom,’ a diagonal series of stitched images. Again creating a set of images completely useless in creating a panorama. All of this to say, I don’t expect your camera to ever be perfectly level. There are things like the composition to consider that will require an unleveled camera. However, there is no reason that your tripod plate shouldn’t be perfectly level with your camera as close to level as your composition will allow. There will always be some amount of cropping after stitching the images together, the goal is to minimize it by keeping things level.
Create a Buffer
This tip goes hand in hand with keeping things level. As I mentioned above, the goal is to keep things as level as possible with consideration to the composition. However, we know that in almost all cases our camera will be slightly unlevel and cropping will be necessary. Knowing this we need to be smart and shoot with some buffer. We need to provide our composition with a little room around the edges so that we don’t lose anything important when it comes to stitching in post. Let’s say my ideal composition was going to be shot at 35 mm; maybe I’ll back it out to 28 mm to give myself that buffer needed in post. Of course, anytime a crop is necessary we are going to lose resolution, but a small loss in resolution is worth ensuring a great composition.
Shoot Opposite
This one took me a little while to figure out, and I feel silly for not doing it earlier. The basic idea is that if shooting a horizontal panorama, the individual images should be shot vertically. The converse is true for a vertical panorama. The opposite shooting technique comes full circle with the idea that panoramas make incredible large format prints. Let me briefly explain why this makes sense. In this example I’ll assume we have a perfectly level tripod and camera and do not need to crop in post (not entirely realistic, but it’s easier to explain). Let’s take a 24mp full-frame camera, a pretty standard entry-level professional camera made by most manufacturers. A 24mp camera will produce an image with a resolution of 6000px X 4000px (w x h). Now, I’m in the field, I have my camera set up horizontally and I want to capture a landscape as a 3:1 panorama. I pan my horizontal camera and take 4 or 5 shots (ensuring there is enough overlap). I stitch those shots together in post and I’ve created a panorama with a resolution of 12000px X 4000px. Printing at standard museum-quality dpi of 300 provides us with a 40" panorama. Now, let’s go back to the field and try the same thing with a vertically oriented camera (now probably requiring 7 or 8 shots for the same composition). I stitch these new images together and end up with a 18000px X 6000px. Using the same printing standards this image can be printed at 60". This technique of shooting opposite not only provides great benefits when printing but also gives you a little more room for error when it comes to cropping and creating a buffer. Always shoot opposite, there’s nothing wrong with having more pixels to play with.
That’ll conclude my 5 tips for better panoramas. Always remember to lock your white balance and focus, get things level and if you can’t, create a buffer, and remember to shoot opposite. There are few things more spectacular than a dramatic sweeping landscape, and hopefully, these tips will help you capture it the next time you have the opportunity. I hope you found these tips helpful and easy to understand. If you have any questions, leave me a comment or shoot me an email at matt@mattgashley.com and I will be sure to get back to you. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to read this article. If you’re interested in seeing any of my panoramic work be sure to check out my limited edition collection on my website. Also, if you’re interested in keeping up with new print releases, workshop updates, and tutorials and articles consider subscribing to my monthly newsletter. Thanks again and I’ll talk to you all again soon!
