Have You Thought About Doing More Panorama Photography?

well hello everybody and welcome to another Sunday here in my office now know if you've noticed but over the past few months there has been sort of like a routine if you like of location videos on Wednesday and office videos on a Sunday and that really is it's just to give me that work-life balance and it's working about so pretty much you can expect that for the foreseeable future most of the time anyway but in today's video I want to expand on my last video and if you haven't seen my last video I'll put a link just here and in the last video I shot this image this is a panorama of a beautiful snowy mountain range with some ice and some spruce trees not really like the image in that video I edited a large portion of time to talking about the creation of this image and also given some tips on panorama photography so in this video as I delve deeper into that not only am I going to show you how I edit this image and put the whole thing together don't worry it's very fast it's very simple it doesn't go on for that long I want to discuss the question of why panel why would you shoot a panoramic or a panorama panoramic panorama well the one of the obvious answers to that question is that when a landscape suits itself to that format so you know a beautiful mountain range illuminated by the first light of sunrise that is a classic panorama composition another one might be a beautifully uniformed woodland backlit by the Rising Sun in the middle of autumn but I think more importantly is by shooting panoramas it kind of opens up your eye opens up that creativity when I was in kinder I was with another photographer in our group he was called print and he pretty much exclusively shoots Panos he's got the full nodal rail rig and it's very impressive his set of it he sees the world in Panavision so there were times when we were stood at a location and I didn't see a composition but Brennan is getting excited and he's seeing this this panorama sort of unfold in front of him and I think to have that eye is definitely a fantastic asset in any photographers bag if you like now you don't need any special hardware to shoot panels yes you can get the full panoramic head and the nodal rail and and that's certainly a great asset to have but for me personally I don't do any of that all I have is my tripod head in my L bracket and that is fine I've never ever had a problem where my image wouldn't stitch because there was some shift in perspective caused by rotating from the camera body and not the nodal point so I just don't need the extra expensive sure way and the extra fat however if that problem ever occurs in the field and no doubt I will invest in a nodal rail and going forward into 2019 I want to shoot more panels so you know I think it's great I think by going out and trying to shoot panels and having that panel vision I think you can open up locations that you otherwise may feel like you have you know exploit it to death that you have shot to death and I think it's just a fantastic way of expressing your creativity going out and trying exclusively to shoot panels and yeah this is one of my images and I'm gonna discuss this in more detail another reason as to why she panels is there ma who's live file sizes this image is fifteen thousand pixels by five thousand two hundred and ninety five and what that means is you can see every single detail you know image clarity and the image quality is phenomenal and should you ever go to print your panels which I highly recommend you do because nothing looks better in a large print than at panel if you do choose to print you're gonna see every every single detail so that's another reason to shoot panels so this panel and most if not all of my other panels are six by seventeen ratio now the main reason for there is because I want consistency across the board so I want them all to be the same the reason six by seventeen I was probably influenced by the old film cameras the old panoramix that were all six by seventeen it seems like a natural ratio just like four by five or eight by ten is a natural ratio and I think you should start as you mean to go on so if you haven't shot panels before when you're considered considering trying it I would definitely keep the six by 17 ratio in mind so that as you go on and shoot more and more they're all the same so I'm now going to go in and edit this image and show you exactly what I did so I took this panoramic I took it three times and generally just to be safe the conditions weren't changing that much but the one the set of images of the group of images that I chose to edit that's the first group and here we have seven photographs stitching a panorama is so incredibly simple select your group of images here I've got seven images and I'm going to go into photo photo merge panorama simple as that Lightroom now creates a preview now I've got three projection things here three projection modes spherical cylindrical and perspective so 50% of the time are you spherical 50% of the time you cylindrical and I've never really used perspective spherical and cylindrical I see very very little difference between the two perspective is more for architectural photography so what that will do is it will stitch your images as if they're on a flat table and in theory that should keep your edges perfectly straight and everything nice and vertical your verticals vertical I find most of the time spiracle does a fantastic job now look at the white edges on the edge of this panorama here that's what I'm talking about when you level your tripod the less level or the more wonky your tripod is the more of that kind of white area you're going to have and that's why I always saying visit your panorama and then shoot a bit wider than you need to so you've got that room to crop out those white edges and crop into your panorama now what you can do is if you mess that up and your tripod wonky and you've got these huge white spaces the top and bottom of your image and you didn't leave enough breathing space you can use the boundary warp slider and what that does is essentially it stretches of warps your image to fill those corners but I don't like using that at all that's why I shoot wider than I need to so I can crop it so Lightroom has now produced this ginormous raw file for me to work on which is fantastic bear in mind that before I did nothing to the images other than select them and merge two panoramas so we're now gonna go in and edit this file the first thing I'm going to do is apply my 6 by 17 crop this is a custom crop which I've entered myself and it's saved in Lightroom so there we go so this is not going to be the final image no remember when I was on location I said that you want to shoot wider and you need to you need to envisage your panorama I did not envisage my panorama starting at this kind of cutoff Messi group of trees on the right-hand side you see this gap just here between this tree and this fallen tree that is where I want my panoramic to start I want a nice clean border with room to breathe the images subject the elements within the frame need room to breathe now also the sky was fantastic so I wanna bring in more of the sky put in the mountain range on the top third of the image just like that and looking at this I would say that I want to chop off a bit of the left-hand side is it really doesn't add much I just cut it to about here where we see this final mountain ridge so personally I think the crop tool is the most powerful tool that you have at your disposal you know I can massively change the look and feel of an image you know you can remove distractions and you can really guide the viewer through the image you know from a square to a four five to a 3-2 to a six by 17 the crop tool is is very very powerful and the feel of an image is massively affected by the format of the image okay I am happy with the ratio of this and there is my file now what I'm gonna do actually is just go in and have a quick look because not always but in the past Lightroom can occasionally mess up the stitching and you can see some weird artifacts going on but this looks clean as a whistle so not a problem that's all so actually I have to say the raw file looks really good you know the light really was perfect on this morning but the shadows they're very deep when we have some hotspots on the mountains where the direct sunlight is hitting with snow but if you look at my histogram it's a great histogram I've got the full range in none of the highlights at clipping and none of the shadows are clipping so that's that's great news but what I want to do is bring down those highlights just on the mountains there just to bring back a bit detail and not make them such a distraction and I'm gonna lift the shadows so I can see the detail in the trees there we go and by doing that I've actually reduced the contrast of the image I'm going to introduce a little bit of contrast okay so that's that's looking great it's looking really good well let me see if I raise yeah if I raise my blacks actually gives me a further detail in the trees which is something of one but I want to be careful I don't want too much out you know the shadows hold a lot of mystery so I don't know I don't want it to myself to be too flat to HDR esque so things are looking pretty good I'm gonna increase the vibrancy here not too much you have to be covered if ayran see you're overcooking look a bit sickly in a bit saturated I just want to bring back some of that punch you know some of those Blues in the ice and blues in the sky now by increasing the vibrancy that's massively affected it's a very blue image it's you know high key blue image southern blue image has become even more blue so one of much you're gonna do is just warming up ever so slightly yeah it's just looking at my highlights I'm just gonna bring those back a little bit and instead just drop the exposure just marginally just by a third core of a stop something like that this is looking good it's looking good it's looking contrasting you can see the detail in the trees but not too much detail you've got the highlights not too overpowering you've got detail in the sky and what I love about panoramic is you can just when you print a panoramic when you shoot a panoramic you you first when you first look at it you see the scene as a whole and that's fantastic but as you live with the image longer and longing you start to see new things like for example I didn't notice this fallen tree when I was on location when I was on psyched I didn't see this but now I look at the image and I think it's a wonderful detail within the image also this open stretch of river here the flowing water is fantastic it's a great little detail the texture of the ice that that sort of the glossiness the glass light quality of the ice that's something really nice and these footprints here on the right hand side that's those are the footprints of me Gavin and Nick probably Adam too and they work in harmony with the images normally I'll get rid of footprints but in this case I'm leaving them because they're not too distracting they're quite subtle and they follow the shape of the riverbanks and they help bring the viewer into the image along with that fallen tree so you know I'm gonna leave the footprints one thing I would like to do actually is bring out a bit more in that sky I think when I was there I remember the sky being more stormy and more a great so I'm gonna drop on a graduated filter which I didn't do in the field but I'm gonna do here in post in Lightroom and let's try and let's try or just less than half a stop and add a touch of clarity I love adding clarity to skies and clouds so let's see how this looks so I'm just holding down shift to make sure that I have a straight edge of straight line here and give it a nice feathered edge so it doesn't affect the trees too much I don't want it to be too noticeable and then subtle yeah there we go all of them there is I've increased the feathering of the filter just to make it less obvious and everything subtle subtle subtle subtleties subtleties subtlety that's my message here and I would say overall the image is looking about done perhaps it's a tad underexposed so what I've done there is I've just increased the whites to bring back and lift all of the whites no it shouldn't affect the highlights too much but it's just gonna bring up the the foreground then the snow given the illusion of overall exposure whereas in fact that won't have affected the shadows and the trees which I think are spot-on so this image feels about doing a couple of quick things that I'd like to do one is sharpening a sharpening defaults to 40 that's fine but I don't need sharpening then the sky I don't need sharpening in the snow all that's gonna do is add noise so I'm gonna use the masking slider I'm gonna hold down option on my Mac which will show me now where the sharpening is being applied white areas have sharpening applied black areas do not so the white areas in the areas with detail so that to me looks about right and actually using this tool if you look in the middle of the screen you see that white dot that is some kind of dirt or maybe a bird or something and so I couldn't see that before but with the masking tool I can see it so I am going to get rid of that [Music] and actually what that's prompted me to do is to visualize my spots so you often get quite a lot of hidden dirt on your sensor in your images that you can't necessarily see when looking at screen but if you were to print it or something like that then you can see it but if you just click the healing tool in Lightroom and then go to the bottom you can see here visualize spots and it essentially does what I've just done with the masking tool there is I can't see any god yeah it's amazing isn't it I've never cleaned my sensor and it is clean as a whistle so that was the only one spot I had to worry about but that's a nice little tip for you if you're concerned about dirty sensor use the visualise spots tool it's fantastic right we're getting there we're getting there now there's one more thing I'm going to do and that is applying vignettes I think the vignette is if done subtly is gonna just pull the eye into the frame into the scene along with the footprints the leaning trees and the ridge on the left-hand side everything's pulling you in to the center of the image the vignette is going to do that as well I just gotta be subtle you don't want to actually be able to see the vignette you know you just want it just wanna darken those corners just I still look just it yeah okay I think we're done I think we do [Music] [Laughter] yeah there you go that's sermon that's this week's video hopefully this has encouraged you to go out and try and shoot some panoramix you really should do because you will be impressed by the image quality the size of the file and how it can change the look and feel of a location that may be familiar to you so I definitely encourage you to go out and try it just make sure that your tripod is level so thank you so much for watching and join me next week as yeah as I can well join me on Wednesday as I shoot more wintery beautiful woodland scenes in Canada and might be going out on a limb here and might be but I think the image in my next video on Wednesday is my best from the trip maybe maybe you can be the judge of that so tune in then but thank you so much for watching bye for now the composition I'm shooting I'm so happy with this just it's just wonderful Nik Paige can't drive and he crashed his car straight into the back of me and Gavin like Minnie Wonka it's just not quite doing it for me

Channel: Thomas Heaton

Views: 79,965

Keywords: panorama photography lightroom, how to stitch a panorama in lightroom, landscape photography hints and tips, landscape photography techniques, panoramic lightroom stitch, how to panoramic in lightroom, how to panorama in lightroom, lightroom landscape photography editing, lightroom processing, how to shoot panos

Id: TvVb942YQF8

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 20 2019