Panoramas can be done in a whole lot of different ways; panoramic cameras, specialised anti-parallax-error tripods, or the simple, yet error prone way.
I do it the simple way. Why? I don’t have the equipment or the dedication to the craft of panoramic photography to purchase the equipment to do it the perfect way. As such, I’ve come up with a few little tricks to minimize the risk of parallax errors (when source images cannot be aligned and skewed into a single image correctly).
Photoshop (especially the newer versions) has a great panorama stitching function already built in. It can be found under “file->automate->photomerge” and does a great job of automatically aligning everything for you.
So, at the time of shooting we need to minimize the chances of parallax errors occurring at merge time. I have found through personal experience that it works best if you make sure everything in the scene is covered at least twice from a slightly different perspective. This scene was shot with vertical camera movements of approximately 30 degrees, and the full 180 degree sweep was done in approximately 20 degree turns. This meant that I took 18 exposures to make this one panorama. First I took 9 shot sweep facing the camera slightly down, then faced it up approximately 45 degrees from my original angle and shot the 9 frames again.
Panoramas can be used for more than just landscapes and cityscapes, however… This is a preview to my upcoming “Cup of Tea in Seoul” project. Stay tuned for more!
