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Creating Panoramic Images

Q: Do you have any tips for getting the best panorama results (camera settings, software, etc) I have not had very much luck with getting quality stitches. I'm using a Nikon 995.

A: My tips for making consistently great panos with Nikon 995 (I've made a LOT of them with my 995).

#1: Honor GIGO or it will bite you.

In the printing business, we had saying: GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). In other words, the end product will never be good unless what you feed into the beginning of the system is good stuff. Consider the panorama stitching software your printing press and make sure to feed it good photos, with consistent rotation amounts and good exposure.

#2: Mount the camera on a tripod

Preferably a good tripod although I've made plenty of great panos on my dirt cheap next to useless tripod. If you have a good tripod (ie, you paid + $300 for it) then you probably already have a good head for it, complete with spiffy little degrees of rotation marks on it. If not, you'll want to add them to your tripod so you can rotate it by fixed amounts. Before getting a good tripod and head, I created a little paper cutout that I marked off 15 degree increments on and taped that to my cheap tripod. It worked. :)

I use the SK-E900 flash bracket so that I can get the focal point of the camera much closer to the axis of rotation on the tripod. This is very important when your subject is physically close (anything less than 20-30 feet) to you. As your subject gets farther away, I find that I can hand-hold the 995 and guess-ti-rotate the right amount and still get great results. I use the hand-hold method for most of my nature panoramas.

If your software is having a hard time seaming the images accurately, there's a good chance that the focal point of the lens was shifted during the capture portion of the shoot. This is "normal" without using the flash bracket or some other improvised gizmo to get the axis of rotation of the lens close to that of the tripod. Some programs deal with that inaccuracy better than others. Photomerge (part of Adobe Photoshop CS and PS Elements) does not deal with it very well.

#3: Set camera to Manual mode
#4: Set white balance (using White Balance Preset)
#5: Attach Wide Angle lens and select it in the lens menu.

I find that by far, my favorite lens for creating panoramas is the Wide Angle (WC-E63). I find that the 995's 38mm just isn't enough field of view (FOV) in 95% of the cases. So, I screw on my Wide Angle (dropping me down to 24mm) and mount the camera on the SK-E900 Flash Bracket. I then rotate the camera vertically so that I'm shooting in portrait orientation. That way I capture a much wider vertical FOV.

The fisheye gives an amazing FOV but it's hard to correct all the rectilinear distortion. If you are smarter than I and know how to easily do that, then more power to you. :) Unless I want to end up with a QuickTime VR full pano, I avoid the FishEye lens.

#6: Set Auto-Exposure Lock

#7: Take your first (exposure locking) photo.

Do this while pointing at a point in the area where the exposure will be the most neutral. IE, if you're indoors, don't point at a window or your exposure for the rest of the interior will be far too dark. The first exposure locks the exposure until you reset it (or turn AE Lock off). Consider this mandatory for any panoramic work.

#8: Rotate the tripod & camera to your first shot and begin shooting, rotating the camera around using the rotation marks on your tripod.

#9: Import them into your computer

#10: Do any necessary corrections

#11: Seam the photos

After taking my series of photos, I import the photos onto one of my Mac's and use PanoramaMaker (ArcSoft) to seam them together. It does the job quite admirably. If I remember correctly, an older version of PanoramaMaker came with the 995. I acquired the latest (3.0) version with something else I bought (I don't recall what) and other than not working on my Dual G5 (I have to stitch on my PowerBook), it does a great job if you feed it well.

I also have and use Photoshop CS and Photoshop Elements and have used the Photomerge function which, frankly, is next to a worthless feature. You are far better off buying a Photoshop book (or three), learning Photoshop and all it's tools, and then doing the job of merging the images yourself. Although it's a pain, you'll do a far better job manually.

I also have Canon PhotoStich and consider it worthless.

The only other option, and it's a darned good one is PanoTools. It's a free software package and it achieves outstanding results but it's a real pain to get set up and working. Everyone I know that uses it uses it with a front end such as PTMac.

Many years ago I used QuickTime VR Authoring Studio. It worked fairly well with my QuickTake 150 but was also quite complex and got orphaned. It also required an ADB key to use. Yucky, but if you wanted to try it, I can probably find the key, notebooks (yes, the manuals are two big notebooks!), and software.

Last modified on 4/25/05.