PANORAMIC PHOTOGRAPHY - A guide on how to photograph Panoramas

hi everyone it's tom mackey here now i've brought you out on a really nice evening in suffolk right along the river blythe uh next to blythe where church which you can see off in the distance i've come down here to um actually an answer to one of our viewers request to do a video on how to shoot panoramic stitches so as i'm walking along here i thought this looks fantastic look at these clouds coming over this shot now earlier on when i came through here there weren't any clouds at all and i thought nah it's not really going to work tonight but uh i thought this is really nice so i'm just stopping real quick just to get a shot using the the bank as a leading line sweeping around and i'm polarizing this because the sun is at a right angle to me so i'm getting maximum polarization but one thing i've noticed though in the top left hand corner it's going really dark so i'm backing off on the polarization just a little bit and i'm using a three stop lee medium transition grad just over the sky bring it right down to the horizon line and that's going to balance the exposure out but i'm going to go ahead and get this shot and then we'll press on yeah that looks fantastic [Music] just gonna angle that a little bit that's evened it out that's much better i'm just going to check the history because this horizon line is quite bright i want to make sure that i'm yeah not bringing out any highlights but i've got a thin bank of clouds that the sun's actually setting into so it's not exactly the light i was hoping for i was hoping for that really nice golden light but you never know there's some breaks in the clouds that might just come through and give me that nice deep golden light that i want so what i'm gonna show you as we go down there's a spot down here that i've shot before that is perfect for doing panoramics so let's go ahead [Music] this is such a nice evening that i can't get more than 10 feet and i've got to stop for another shot i just love the way this bank comes in you've got this little curve to the bank and the boat on the opposite bank right in front of the church like pull your boat up and go to church but these clouds i'm hoping that they're going to move a little bit further over top of the church and i want those there just before sunset so i'm going to get some really nice light on the church okay let's get in position there's a hole in the cloud coming up i'm hoping that's going to come out i'm going to get some really nice strong light on the church and we'll go through our panoramic [Music] series [Music] okay i'm at my position here on the end of the river and what i'm going to do is a vertical panoramic i'm going to probably do about 10 to 12 shots here across this with a wide angle lens because i want to accentuate that bend in the river now i've got my sun coming out i've got some really nice strong sunlight on that um the only thing is because the the sun is right to my back i am getting my shadow in this but i'm gonna fix that later in post but i'm getting some beautiful light on that and the clouds unfortunately are just hanging over the river here and they're not going to come over the church but we'll go ahead and go through the procedure okay starting off i'm going to do vertical panoramics as i said but the main thing is you want to level your base or the tripod now if you do have a leveling base or reverse ball head i'll put the links down in the uh description below so all you have to do is level the base out you can see i've got a spirit level here just undo the screw on the bottom column and just quickly level that out and this is another reason why i carry a hot shoe on here because i can easily just go like that i don't have to look in the menu now when i pan just looking at the uh spirit level the bubble is not moving so i know that it's going to be level all the way through so once we've leveled the base of the tripod out then you level the camera out as i showed you here and then as you pan through you just double check that to make sure that bubble is not moving anywhere it's fine now there is another issue that when you're shooting panoramics especially when you have an unevenness in the sky you might get this really dark blue blob right in the middle of your frame that's if you're using a polarizing filter now i do have a polarizer on this but i've dialed this out a little bit so i'm not going to get much as i look through this no it looks fairly even next thing you need to do is to calculate your exposure so i'm going to take an average here that is a 10th of a second at f11 i'm using f11 because i want to get some of this foreground here in focus as well i want to make sure that's nice and sharp i'm going to focus just beyond the the bank here probably on the opposite side of the bank so i'm going to set it to manual exposure 10th of a second at f11 now the focus i'm going to focus on the opposite side of the bank there we go and then flip it into manual focus because you don't want the focus changing as you're doing your pan series now i'm going to quickly go through this while we have the light out first thing is i've mentioned this before in my videos take a picture of your hand on this side as you go through your series you take another picture of your hand on this side it makes it so much easier in the post-production to do your editing you know what your series are so let's go ahead and do that you want to make sure you allow enough room on either side it's better to have too much than not enough now i'm going to do because i'm doing a vertical panoramic i'm going to overlap these by a half if you're doing a horizontal you can overlap by say a third that's fine but let's go ahead and do a half and one more that's good now i know some of you are probably thinking he didn't set his nodal point i know i've never bothered doing that in the 15 years i've been shooting panoramics on a digital camera and stitching them together i've never found an issue to set my noodle point now if i'm shooting with a telephoto okay that's a little bit more of an issue but i'm shooting with a wide angle lens and a ball head set up like this is not going to make a huge difference to where the nodal point is now the nodal point a nodal slide if some of you have heard of these it or even a panoramic bracket a panoramic bracket is so large and cumbersome i don't mess with it i don't have the room in my bag for it it's not necessary a nodal slide much smaller compact and they're quite easy to use but again i just feel personally they're unnecessary i know i'm gonna get a lot of complaints but hey that's just it works for me and i've never had to use it before so okay let's go ahead and um the sun is just going into these clouds i'm losing some intensity now but i think i have what i need anyway on this now i'm going to take you back into the studio and we're going to stitch these together but just to make sure i'm going to shoot one more that looks fantastic the sky is nice and even i think this is going to stitch together really nicely now i tell you i tell you a little story and i know i'm digressing from what i'm trying to show you here but just bear with me last time i was out here in the winter time i came down and i thought i've been here before i'm just going to wear my hiking boots it'll be fine i didn't follow my own rule whenever you're shooting near water always wear welly boots even if you don't intend to go in invariably you're going to find that angle that you're going to want to go into the water or into mud or whatever i got all the way down here and i thought damn the shot is right across that mud flat i decided to go back and get my wellies i wasn't very far away i had plenty of time to do so so i thought i don't need to carry my pack because i'm not going to be able to set it down in the mud i'll just take what i need so i had just one lens body and the tripod i got down here and the light was gorgeous i'm just about ready to hit the shutter and nothing's happening and i thought okay what's going on look the battery is dead it's flashing i thought right damn i got all the way down here i don't have time to get back to the car to get my spare batteries because i left them in the pack which i didn't think i would need but i thought right there's a fix that i've done in the arctic when i've had batteries go flat on me i always carry spare batteries anyway but i can always manage to squeeze a little bit more power out of a dead battery so i took it out put in my pocket i mean it wasn't even that cold that day it was about six degrees kept in my pocket in my hands for about five minutes put it back in fired it up and i had enough charge i thought okay let's get a couple shots off real quick before the battery dies again and i thought let's see if i can do another composition and then it died so i took it out again i did this procedure five times i was able to complete five different compositions on a dead battery and that was impressive i thought yeah good tip for future if your batteries ever die on you just put them in your pocket warm them up put them back in that's if you don't have your spare with you but always recommend carrying a spare it's nice i've got a swan coming in here too right by the church so i'm just going to do another one the lights coming out again he's hanging behind that stump i'm just going to wait till he comes out a little bit more okay here we go now here comes my swan i'm just going to quickly do a a straight shot with him in that with the bend of the river just zoom in filling the frame with this bend in the river i don't want to have a lot of excess this could really do with some clouds i know but hey can't be too picky this is a gorgeous evening so we're straight here getting thrashed by these little uh midges real nice head midges but hey we are standing in a marsh okay heads up come on swan heads up lift your head out of the water right there that's it that's the shot right there yes looks nice now you may notice that i'm not using my cable release unfortunately i drop it in the mud and when you know it the contacts went straight down into the mud so i'm not going to put that in the camera now you might wonder why would you shoot a vertical panoramic as opposed to a horizontal panoramic a couple of reasons you can accentuate a bend like this uh by doing a vertical panoramic you get more real estate to your frame so if you do need to crop it you just crop out and just use the sweet spot which is the center part of the lens you do get more uh real estate in the foreground so if you want to include more foreground or if you had some fantastic skies or fantastic clouds in the sky yeah that's when you would use a vertical panoramic horizontal if you don't have a lot of time to shoot say if if something is changing the lighting or the clouds are moving quite quickly just quickly do a horizontal panoramic that'll work much better in that situation i'm just going to zoom in on this and get a straight shot here just as he lifts that's it okay i made it back i almost spent the night in the salt marsh because i got stuck in the mud nearly filled my welly boots up but let's go ahead and get started i'm going to show you how to actually stitch all these images together using lightroom it's very quick and easy so let's get started see here this is our selection between my hands here is when you're doing various panoramics you can see how they can all merge into one so it's nice to have your hand or finger whatever to divide your selection so let's go ahead and select all these there's about 13 of them go up to photo and then photo merge panorama let's still take a few minutes to stitch this together because when you're doing a vertical panorama obviously you're shooting a lot more this is going to be a huge file in the end so if you want to make big prints perfect now i if you have hardware that can cope with this i've just treated myself to a 5k imac which is amazing and i never realized how sharp my images were but this will be done in just a second there we go and we'll go ahead and tick the fill edges and that just automatically fills in the edges now this is the cylindrical view i'll just show you what the spherical looks like it just shortened it out so it depends on the look that you want but let's just go ahead and do that and merge and that'll take a few minutes to put that together once this is done there's our panoramic and we'll go into the develop mode and do a little bit of cropping because there's because we don't have any clouds in there i want to crop some of that sky out let's go ahead and just zero that down set the black point i'm just gonna hold the shift key down and double click on the blacks to set the black point and the white point and now i'm going to crop this now i've i'm going to set this up to a one to two proportion so i don't really want all this excess area over here and let's just hold the shift key down and that will keep that proportion and a little bit more room than that there we go okay i still think that's got a little bit too much sky so let's go ahead and change to three to one and just see how that copes that's much better that's cropped a lot more of the sky out it's not really needed and i'm i'm pleased with the way this shape looks here in the foreground so i'm going to go ahead and let's just set the lights out so you can get an idea of that that looks good go ahead and select that put the lights back on okay there you have it so that's quite easy to do so i hope you've enjoyed this video and uh coming out with me on the mud flats and didn't get stuck but um if you did like this hit the like buttons and please do subscribe that does help our channel out quite a bit uh so i'll see you again in the next video if you have any ideas for videos that you'd like to see us produce go ahead and put it in the comments below until next time bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Landscape Photography iQ with Tom Mackie

Views: 7,315

Keywords: what is panoramic stitching, what is a panoramic picture, how do you make a panorama in photoshop, stitched panorama, stitched panorama photoshop, stitched panorama software, stitched panorama tutorial, landscape photography, landscape photography tips, landscape photography blue hour, thomas landscape photography, panoramic landscape photography, panoramic photography tips, panoramic photography lenses, panorama photography tricks, panoramic photography equipment

Id: tlaLqvMFQRQ

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 13 2021