Panoramic Photography: What You Need & Tips for Shooting Panoramas

[Music] hello i'm charles from charleston photography today we're going to be discussing the gear that we need to photograph panoramas now this video tutorial is part of a series of three videos the first one today we're going to be discussing the gear that we need to photograph panoramas the second tutorial we're going to be going to scarborough harbor and i'm going to be showing you how to actually photograph a panoramic image with just your camera then on a tripod and then with a panoramic head the last video in the series is i'm going to be showing you how i actually edit these images in adobe lightroom and then blend these images in one of my panoramic programs to end up with a panoramic image so today we're just going to be discussing the gear that we need we can just start off by using our digital slr with preferably a wide angle lens or we could put on the tripod or we could go the whole nine yards and use a panoramic head and i will discuss why some of these are better than others let's just start with why we would actually want to photograph a panorama instead of just taking a single image as you can see on my monitor there is a really nice stormscape image now there is no way possible that i could actually photograph this image in just a single frame i had to take 10 photos sideways to actually get this image so before we jump into the video i will actually show you why when we're trying to photograph wide scenes like this it is best to actually photograph in panoramic format then just take a single image and understand that when we're photographing a panorama the idea is not to get everything in the idea is that what we have we have in more detail let's just look at this stormscape image here and i will explain to you a few details so this stormscape image was taken a few years ago with my nikon d7500 using the nikon 18 to 35 mil lens there were 15 photos needed to actually photograph this panoramic image and they were taken at 35 mil in portrait orientation this is what the view would be at 35 mil in portrait orientation this is the same view i would get at 35 mil if i took it in landscape orientation this is the view that i would have if i shot at 18 mils but you can see that i am still missing quite a bit of detail from the right of this panoramic image if we come back here and we look at this 35 mil view this image is actually six thousand by four thousand pixels in size so it's four thousand pixels lengthwise here this image here the full panorama is actually eighteen thousand pixels wide which means three times the size so we have so much more detail in this image so this is why i like taking panoramic images because i can really get a lot more of the scene in so if i tell somebody loves just at scarborough harbor and i photograph this intense stormscape that was coming towards me and i just showed them a 6x4 image of only a third of what i actually seen they would look at it and go like oh yeah that looks pretty good but then if i actually showed this image so they would understand when i would say that this was such an awesome thunderstorm approaching me let's just start off and we'll show we'll go through all the gear how we want to keep it simple at the start so i'm using a nikon d500 with a tekina 11 to 20 millimeter lens now it doesn't matter the camera that you use or the lens that you use but when we're photographing panoramas it's very good to try to keep it a wide angle but not too wide so that we actually have to crop a lot of the image most of the time i find this is why i actually shot that stormscape at 35mm because i can actually zoom a bit and still get a lot more detail than if i was actually having to shoot super wide to try to get as much of the stormscape as i could when we're photographing held held like this and we're spinning it around we can have problems that if we're not keeping it all level we will end up having images that are up and some are down some could be a little bit sideways i only use this method of photographing panoramas when i don't have the time to actually put my gear on a tripod for example if i'm on holidays with my family and we're traveling from point a to point b and we're just driving past in this very nice scene on the side of the road i might just quickly stop grab my camera and quickly get out and take a series of images and then keep driving in panoramic photography there is one thing that is very crucial to learn and to understand and that is called parallax error in simple terms parallax error just means that if you're not lined up correctly with your camera then an object that is far from you and an object that is close to you has you moving along taking photos they will not stay in the same alignment so you'll end up with parts of the image that will be ghosted meaning that they'll appear more than once and maybe sometimes that the program that you're using to merge these images might merge them properly or might even fail to merge them because they can't line up the foreground and the background objects properly today i will show you all the gear and i'll briefly explain a little bit about parallax error but in the next video i will actually show you how to actually minimize parallax error and the easy steps that you can do to actually make sure that you don't have any parallax error in your panoramic images the most basic way of taking a panorama is just handheld photographing handheld is fairly good if you're using an ultra wide or even a wide angle lens around 18 to 20 probably 25 millimeters if i'm using a lens like my nikon 18 to 140 millimeter lens and i zoom out to 100 millimeters and i'm trying to photograph handheld then i would probably find that i would end up having problems with parallax area that my foreground and background subjects would not line up properly but shooting with a wide angle lens you wouldn't have too much problem so the next step after handheld is actually to put your camera on a tripod a lot of photographers actually like using an l bracket an arca swiss l bracket because most tripods these days have arca swiss clamps it's just a generic type of clamp system but just about all the gear comes in the beauty of having an l bracket is that we don't have to just have the camera in this fashion if we mount our camera in landscape orientation like it is now the problem is that yes we only need maybe two or three images to actually get the length that we need but we're going to miss out on the height this is why we actually have the l bracket on and we actually photograph in portrait orientation so now we're getting a lot of detail up but now we're going to need quite a few more photos to actually get from the left edge to the right edge of our image and putting our camera on the tripod we don't have this shakiness look at this image here now this was taken handheld in my backyard it gives you an idea of what happens when you're shooting handheld and that you cannot keep the camera straight you can see that not all the images line up correctly from left to right which means when you go to crop it you're actually losing a lot of detail now in this image here you can see that all the photos are actually all lined up this was because they were taken on a tripod when we put the camera on the tripod we don't have any of this instability there's no shakiness and all that and i tell people when we're photographing like this you really want to put your camera at least a two second timer or use a remote so we're not touching the camera and we're not inducing any sort of shaking in the camera because the last thing you want is if you took a series of photos you get back home and you can actually see there might be one or two that are a bit fuzzy that means that your whole panorama has been always now before we actually put the camera on our tripod to actually take a set of images what we want to make sure is that the tripod is level what's going to happen is if your tripod is not level you're going to get a tilting whether it starts from the top works downwards or vice versa so we have to level the tripod and the easiest way to do this is with a little spirit level like these one for front and back because you want to make sure that your tripod is perfectly level left and right and front to back most of the time what i do is i quickly take off my bald head here like so and i put my spirit level on the tripod that i'm using at the moment it is my manfrotto zero five five xp pro it has a spirit level on the tripod so i can actually just use the spirit level on the tripod to get my tripod level but if your tripod does not have a spirit level so quickly take the bald head off put the spirit level now this tripod is level we put the bald head on loosened a little bit and then i just put my spirit level on here and now it's very easy i can actually see okay so now i know that left to right front and back everything is level now i can actually just go ahead put my camera on and secure it when i'm photographing this way the easiest way in daytime is actually to use live view and when we're photographing panoramas a key thing is we need overlap you need at least a third of overlap if i'm shooting a nightscape image of the milky way i may use more than the third but i will not use more than half because the problem then is that when we go to stitch these images up sometimes the programs get confused if you've got two images that there are too much overlap in them they will get confused and they'll think that they're the same image and they won't blend the images properly so we put the camera in live view i just have the bald head just slightly tight so i can actually still swing around but without play so i can actually just start here and go yep okay take photo move on a little bit there's about third overlap take photo so on and so on so on but the problem with this we're going to have parallax error that is because what is called the nodal point this is the part of the lens that everything swings around on a lot of people get confused they think that okay well when i swing around like this the sensors here so it's actually just lining it all up with the sensor this is highly inaccurate we actually have on our lenses a nodal point they change for every lens and also if you have a zoom lens like for example a nikon 18 to 140 the nodal point at 18 mil will actually be different to 140 millimeters so if you make sure that for example you set up all your gear you say yes i don't have any parallax at 18 mil and then you go out and shoot a panorama at 140 mil you will find that you will have errors in there because you didn't check where your camera needed to be at 140 mils where the nodal point was for this one it only moves about five millimeters between 11 and 20 mils and the nodal point for this lens is 35 mils from the edge of the camera into the lens one word of advice is sometimes when you do a search on the internet they'll actually tell you from the front of the lens for example they'll say okay you've got to go back 40 mils i actually prefer to say okay well if they tell me 40 mils this way then i measure put a very small little pencil line there then i measure from the end of the lens back because it's so much easier when everything is set up to actually use a little rule and say okay well this is where the camera needs to be this is the easiest way to actually photograph a panorama and this is the way that i did it when i actually started taking panoramas so this is basic setup the next part that we can use is an arca swiss rail with an arca clamp so when we put it on our tripod we can actually put the camera further back i've just put the spirit level here just so you can see this orange this is where the center of the tripod is you can actually see now there's my camera before it was actually over here so i've actually pushed it back this lens i have to have it 35 mils back so i've actually pushed it back 35 mils now if i actually take the same panorama i will not have any parallax error in my panoramic image this is a much better way of photographing now you can buy these on ebay for around 40 odd dollars this is one of the easiest ways to take panoramas without too much effort but the problem even using it this way is that in daytime you're relying on your live view early morning or at night you have to keep looking at your viewfinder this means that when you're doing it either by live view or looking through the viewfinder going from left to right is going to take you a bit of time if your scenery isn't changing it's not a big deal but if you've got like a stormscape or you're at the beach and there's waves going around and you're taking some time getting from left to right you're going to find that the scene is not going to stitch up properly now this is why we need what's called a panoramic rotator what these do is i'll put it on the tripod here now i'm actually just going to put the rail on here back where it should be at 35 mils you might think that i'm guessing where the 35 mil is but because when i photograph panoramas 90 of the time i'm using this lens i've actually made a score mark on the rail so i know that there is no guesswork i don't have to have the ruler there and measure i've got a little score mark and i put it exactly in the middle of the tripod this is what the rotator does you can see it's going to click click click click click now on the panel rotator you've actually got screw holes here this one starts at around 15 degrees and works up to 90 degrees so if we're thinking of a whole circle at 15 degrees it's actually going to take you a lot of images to actually if you're doing a full 360. if you're at 90 degrees you'd actually cover that in just four photos this is the beauty that there's no guesswork so if i'm at the woody point jetty because there is a storm front coming i can use a rotator and i can quickly see with fly view how much overlap i'm going to get for example at 15 mils if i have too much overlap then i can move to 25 degrees if that is correct saying okay that's great this means that i can actually take one set of panoramic images very quickly and then i can actually wait for the storm to get a little bit closer but there's no guesswork involved i can actually just quickly go back to where i started and swing around and my overlap is exactly the same so when i teach people how to photograph panoramas this is the sort of rig that i tell people to use it is quite inexpensive a panoramic rotator they start at around 50 to 60 odd dollars on ebay they can go up to a couple hundred dollars for better brands but if you're just starting out something like this is ideal so once you've got a rail like this and you've worked out where your nodal point is you can go out at any time and it's very easy to set up and it's quite inexpensive so this is great for i would say 80 percent of people who are into photographing panoramas if you want to take your panoramas to the next level for example if you're wanting to take panoramas let's say a hundred mils you're not going to get a lot of the scenery that's in front of you because you're zoomed in so close so you're going to have to take multiple rows of images at least two and sometimes three this is where our next piece of gear really comes into its own and what we use is a panoramic tripod head most of the time when you buy these it comes with this whole arm and the rotator the system that i'm using cost me around 250 dollars a couple of years ago but what i will mention is that when you look at one of these don't look at the cheaper models especially on ebay from china because a lot of these are not built to a high standard for example if i was holding the base and the arm here and flexing like this i would have flex or just pushing like this i would have a lot of flex in the arms here this is quite important because once you have the weight of the camera on here if there's flex here as you're moving along your images are not going to be lined up they're going to be slightly out you could have a problem when you're going to stitch them up this is where we cannot use the l bracket we actually have to take the l bracket off our camera and just use a standard arca swiss clamp so i'll do that now a lot of these plates have a flathead screw here most people don't carry screwdrivers around so a tencent piece or a small washer is ideal to actually use to actually undo the clamp here so we'll undo the clamp now what you did notice is that the l-bracket runs the length of the camera when we put the arca swiss clamp on just on the standard one what we have to do is actually put it facing the front of the camera so it doesn't go lengthwise of the camera it actually faces the front because on the panoramic bracket here the camera actually faces this way when it's all set up i'll actually set this up as it should be so we rotate it around and this one here actually has to be rotated upwards make sure i'm at 90 degrees now i actually just clamp my camera you actually have to make sure that the clamp is nice and tight because if it's not everything's going to fall down now just like this arca swiss plate here that i had a little score mark here this panoramic head has also got a score mark of where the camera is in the center so i actually just line it up with the score mark because we actually want the camera to be in line with our tripod and then what we do is we actually spin the camera around this way this is why it has another arm here now we have to move this arm back to where it should be so that the nodal point is in the center so we'll do that now because i've got a score mark on this one as well so now when i spin this around everything is in unison i'm not going to have any parallax error because the nodal point lines up so this arm here controls the nodal point and the base plate here controls where the camera is in the center of the frame so that there is no error at all and this will stitch panoramas beautiful and this means that you can actually take panoramas at any time of the day or night and you won't have any problem now why would you want to use something like this instead of just this plate here well at night time or like i said just before if we're zoomed in at 100 mils we actually need to take a series of images and we need these images to line up this is where the rotator comes in because every time we move it it will be in the same place so for example if i set it up like this so the camera's tilting down a little bit now so i'm actually getting a lot of the foreground i can actually take a series of images like this they'll all be level then i can actually come back to the start take another set of images let's say at this angle here take it across then i can come back again to the start and now tilt up and when we're doing this we're actually looking on the back of the camera to make sure that we have overlap remember i talked it you need overlap when you're going sideways but when you're doing rows you need the same sort of overlap and i will discuss this in much more detail when we're at scarborough harbour so this is the beauty of a panoramic head but what i do tell people is that when you start off photography doesn't have to be expensive so just start by using just your standard kick lens at 18 mil and you can just either hand hold or just put it on your tripod and learn to take panoramas then if you decide that yeah panoramas is the thing that i'd like to do then you can invest more money in say one of these plates and a panoramic rotator and this will help you take perfectly aligned panoramas all of the time if you decide to actually go the whole hog and say yep well you know i've got 250 300 in the bank and panoramas is really something that i want to master then just go straight out and buy one of these systems here but the key point here in panorama photography and in the gear is that when we set up if our tripod is not level then we are actually really hindering ourselves when we're taking photos because you need to have everything level to actually get the most out of your panoramic images thank you for watching in the next video we'll actually be going out to scarborough harbour to photograph panoramas but before we get to scarborough harbor i'll actually show you how to find the nodal point on your lens so that you don't have any parallax error or a very small amount of parallax air that won't actually affect your images when you blend them so if you've got a comment or a question leave it in the comment box below give me a thumbs up and subscribe to my youtube channel i'll see you next time this is charles for charles and photography bye for now you

Channel: Charles N Photography

Views: 8,463

Rating: 4.9191918 out of 5

Keywords: Panoramic Photography, Youtube tutorial, Nikon, Nikon D500, Tokina, Tokina 11-20mm, Panorama, Panorama Photography, how to Shoot Panoramas, Camera Gear, Wide Angle Lens, photography, take better photos, photography tutorial, Charles Niautou, Charles N Photography, Charles photo place, Panoramic Photography: What You Need for Shooting Panoramas, Tips for Shooting Panoramas, What You Need for Shooting Panoramas

Id: xkmIh2lmbag

Length: 25min 52sec (1552 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020