Landscape Photography - HOW TO SHOOT PANORAMAS

so this video is about shooting panoramas there are two formats that I like to shoot in 1x1 square format square crop and that's probably because it reminds me of when I used to shoot with Hasselblad 6x6 and other one is panoramas which I do a lot of and that's probably me harking back to my past too wishing I had bought a Hasselblad expand which is the 6 / 17 format 35 lb Hasselblad when I taught on workshops years ago I used to say to people that in order to take a nice photograph firstly you've got to visualize that image as if you're looking through viewfinder eyes because it can be directors or lots of places which are nice views but they don't always take a nice photograph and there's a difference between a nice view and something which will feel a nice photograph panoramas and that on that point are actually quite difficult to visualize because if you're taking multi shots across the way you have no real vision until you stitch them all together of where things are going to be placed in your composition and that can be really quite challenging until you get used with it West taken panoramas as well to try and help you visualize them for instance if you take take something with a straight line on it like this here and you go quite wide the wider you go the more conversions you get with these straight lines particularly in the horizontal plane just as he would with an ultra wide-angle lens so what are the things I've learned over the years is that when you're taking a shooting Panos your optical vantage point has got to be in the middle to the far distance you're not taking a foreground object without with a landscape in the back when you're actually looking at shapes at color and at contrast in the middle to far distance and in order for our landscape panel to work properly you've got to have a black point so panoramas without a black point can just look a wee bit blur and just they're not that impactful I shoot a lot of them because they're really easy to hang on walls they don't take up a lot of wall space because that along but they're not too tall and I generally shoot with a longer lens to stock barrel distortion from overlapping and stitching so I'm going to show you I'm looking at I've actually come around the corner here on the Gateway the Paradise Road from glenorchy to the Queen stone and I've come across this cloud inversion it's up in the hills here and as you can see there's some partially clad clouds or we are pie above the cloud and you can see landscape below that now this is just H and out for some kind of panorama that's really stunning look at this so what I'm thinking is I'll show you what I'm saying up with and I'll just wait on these clouds to keep on do you keep on moving until that part in the middle there I can see as cleared and I should allow me to shoot several shots they make up a lovely panorama but if you can see here left to right there's actually some carbon some shape and some composition here don't need the bottom this is a very wide lens but I'm gonna shoot right in with a longer lens to get more detailed and large so that when I come to print it it's gonna be super duper shot let's have a little look at the camera right so on the camera base here we've got the tripod base we've got this levelling head thing in the middle here and what this allows me to do is the two ways you can level your tripod you need to have your tripod level and you can either muck around with the legs so that's just downright fiddly so I got this thing here which is the Sun way photo leveling head and that simply allows me to lock off the base here and it gives me again flexibility just on the tripod head without having to move my tripod later so I'm going to get this level try the other hand you so you need to have this tripod base absolutely level for a panel to work and it needs to work this way because of the way that we stitch the images together so that's that locked right down what are they need to do I don't know if you can see this it's when we put the camera on and put it onto the live view there's two dials here one at the top and one down the side ordinarily my panels I get both of them level level on the side 1 and level on the top one as well and that just simply allows me to keep horizons in the middle for shooting my shots so I'm gonna lock that off just now with this one level at the top which is the level left and right and then this one here on the side which is currently straight ahead but because I'm gonna be shooting up the way I'll keep the top one level that's the left and the right and all I'm gonna do it's just simply leave this back making sure that I'm still level on the camera because I know I've already got my base level and I need to have a base level and the camera level left to right - that's it level now it's time to shoot now one of the things that you see on the top of my tripod here just take this camera off it's this reel here which is called a nodal real the nodal rail allows me to slide this back and forward with the camera and talk but additionally I've also got a double clamp this thing here is really cool because it gives me full versatility over where my camera goes in relation to the center of the tripod so inside each lens you have what's called a nodal point and for panoramas that work properly you have to position the rotation point in and around the nodal point rather than swing the camera from the front tip to swing it round there's a nodal point at the rear and that helps with your conversions so when I said there's a each lanes is different but I'm going to assume if I slide this back slide this all the way back slide this forward because then if I was working with grad fellows I could put them in the front and it would clear the front but I'm assuming here that unless let's the nodal point is roundabout it's somewhere in here it's about a third of the way down the lines normally and that just allows me then to rotate this around that central nodal point rather than rotate it around the camera and it makes a difference it makes a difference to how they stitch together because there's no conversions particularly with a wider lens and the last piece of madness in the setter is my ball head no this ball head probably measures about 60 millimeters across and this ball head here is rooted for about 40 kilograms and I don't need that much bearing but when I lock stuff down on landscape shoots this just cannot move and the 40 kilogram ball head it allows it to steep perfectly perfectly still now there's a few other knobs on here there's this one here which allows me to rotate across the already level base there's the big one here for listening this off but there's also a friction friction one here for fine tuning I can tighten this up to move it ever so slightly just to get perfectly level and then lock everything down and then once we've done this everything is good to go it's a heavy setup though so the clouds actually quite nice now and we've got some light a cloud in the bottom you've got some break up at the top but we're stealthy and true black point through the top here because we need that black pointed ground image but we've also got some lovely colors over the left hand side so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a light meter reading I want the texture of the clouds didn't mean the same so what I've got here is I've actually got I've got sixtieth of a second F 13 so I'm actually quite happy with that I'm gonna shoot this at 160 millimeters so your panoramas will be determined by two critical components one is your X dimension and the other one is your Y dimension and your X dimension will generally be determined by the number of shots that you take from left to right or right to left your Y dimension on the other hand will be determined by your focal length whether you're shooting in a vertical format or whether you're sitting in a horizontal format but why determination will be set by the focal length that you're shooting at or how you crop in post now there's something quite nice about panoramas when you see people looking at them because all of the the format lends itself to being viewed hung in a wall when done properly because all of the data is that my height you don't have to look up and you don't have to look down everything is right in front of you and it really really draws you in it's quite nice to look at when it's done right in the field what I do find is that if I'm trying to the punch in I don't always get a longer lens all the time I did see her brendan van son one to four hundred mill hourglass for his cannon being stolen by Thomas Heaton when they were in a shoot in Patagonia and Thomas was punching in on mountains away in the distance with his 70 to 200 ml lens and he couldn't quite get in tight enough with that eight-five format of his a full-frame camera and see cipher see size sensor are the same and he ended up running from the camera and stealing Brendan's one to four hundred so that he could punch and farther but what I find in the field is that when I need to punch and further and I'm generally shooting in in vertical format they cram as much data in also meter not vertical free on its side because the illusion of the focal length of shooting at is determined with your Y dimension and vice versa so if you want the illusion of zooming n go from a vertical to a horizontal and this is a good example here of two images taken side-by-side at the same time roughly same focal length one in portrait and one in landscape I need to check my focus so go right in here perfect now that's looking really really cool that's really cool and to try and visualize this in frame I'm gonna move this with my hands when this is loose just across the frame to see what I need to take it's where they stop and where they start is the problem here now make sure you've got everything on manual your focus your exposure settings and your white balance which will prevent you getting changes from frame to frame it's some Sun behind me now but you'll just catch the peaks up here and I think I'm gonna take this so this one here I'm gonna start right to left because I think the clouds are moving from right to left and take the first one that's so cool when I overlap my shorts I overlap them by 50% and I always start my shots a particular point on the left of the right-hand frame so if I'm gonna do a multi-role one I know where I started and it's almost 50% overlap sideways and also 50% up and down if I'm gonna do a multi row that's two taken what's the third one I will see so that's a for horizontal short panel now that's actually quite that's gonna be quite wide but if I take more than I need I can then crop in to get a final frame so one piece of advice is probably don't just take what you think you need to sometimes there's problems with the stitching tool that makes up your final image so always take more than you need so the lights changing up here so I'll take one more but one thing I would say is that between sets of panoramas always put your hand in front of the frame to take a blank frame that allows you to separate your frames in post because it's nothing worse than having 30 thought photographs that all look similar and you don't know how to merge them that's pretty cool I'll leave you with this photograph and I will show you how I do this in post so it's into lightroom and i'll show you how easy it is to merge these photographs into your panorama so what we will do here as will open up Lightroom and will maximize this to maximum screen so we can see several photographs here some of which are separated by a black frame and that shows you just how easy it is to identify the frames between these two black frames to define your set of photographs for a panel there in the bottom here though you can see that I have not put a black frame in and you can see how interesting this would be they try and work out which photographs would be used for any given panorama so you need to put a black frame between each said that you do so in the interest of easiness what I'll do is I'll take or take these three actually one two three and we right-click and we merge these in a panorama now I would always advise you shoot in RAW and when you shoot in RAW and you create a panorama the program will do this itself and it shows the panorama here so boundary warp maximize that the flight now any white HS you've got YouTube ad levels and we merge this and when we merge this this actually creates its own DNG file and DNG file is for digital negative wesa dmg file it carry forward all of your dynamic range and you draw qualities into that single combined file now it takes a few minutes to get this done but it creates its own single file so wait for it to digitize and now it's a DNG file so go to the develop module and we process this in the normal way we would a single file so let me just work on that's real quick start with the crop take this down set the white point because of the snow it's the white point said take some blue out luminance up check curves layer adjustments so it really is that simple and I hope you found this video worthwhile I'll leave you with these shorts right at the very end but until next time you keep shooting have a shot at panoramas have fun until then we'll see you soon cheerio [Music]

Channel: Ewan Dunsmuir Images

Views: 16,684

Keywords: Landscape, Pentax 645Z, Ricoh Pentax, Panoramas, Panos, Thomas Heaton, Brendan Van Son, VLOG, Photographer, Photography, Medium Format, Digital, Elia Locardi, Hasselblad, XPAN, X-Pan, Fuji, GFX50, GFX50S, GFX50R, Landscape Photographer, Landscape Photography, New Zealand, NZ, Queenstown, Glenorchy, Gateway to Paradise, Travel NZ, Canon M50, Snow, Mountains, Cloud Inversion, Lightroom, Photoshop, Adobe Creative Suite, Moody landscapes, Shooting in Manual, X1D, NatGeo, National, Geographic, How to

Id: U5dAjgbCN-k

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2019