howto photograph panoramas

There are just a few things to keep in mind when shooting panoramas and I've summarized them in this checklist. You may want to read the equipment and software sections before actually attempting your shot.

Overview

Panoramas are created from a series of overlapping images which cover an entire scene, which are "stitched" together into a geometrically encoded intermediate image, most commonly an equicrectangular projection of the complete scene. A number of derivative images can be created from this intermediate image by applying geometric transformations upon it.

Series of Frames Equirectangular
Overlapping images and resulting equirectangular image

Camera Preparation

You'll need a camera outfitted with a wide-angle lens; I use a Nikon D200 with a 10.5mm fullframe fisheye lens. Calculate the number of frames required to cover the entire field of view with 50% overlap.

Note on overlap
You can have less overlap, but I find that 50% gives me the most options for correcting moving objects in the scene.

Calculate your horizontal field of view in degrees. My 10.5mm lens weighs-in at 88.9°, which I round up to 90°. Divide this number by 2, for 50% overlap, then divide that number into 360°; I get 8, which is the number of exposures around the horizontal plane at 45° intervals. (I sometime use 6 images and sacrifice some overlap.)

Set your camera mode to manual exposure using a small enough aperature to provide appropriate depth of field; I typically use f8. Set your "normal" exposure at the nadir position, which usually gives you the average ambient light level; make adjustments for atypical situations.

Set camera focus to manual operation with the lens focal distance to the hyperfocal point for your aperature.

Note on focus
A good rule of thumb for guessing a close approximation of the hyperfocal point is to focus on a point 1/3 of the way into the scene as seen in the viewfinder.

Adjust your white balance according to the lighting conditions. Automatic white balance can lead to color shifts in portions of the final image.

Note on white balance
If your camera is capable of shooting in raw mode, and you have white balance correction software, then set your camera to shoot raw images with auto-white balance which will give you maximum control during conversion from raw.

Tripod/Panohead setup

Make sure your camera is mounted on your tripod such that the optical center or nodal point coincides with the axis of rotation so that there is no parallax between images.

Shoot Your Panorama

Shoot one or more horizontal rows of overlapping images, then a zenith shot and a nadir shot. I usually hand-hold the nadir shot.