Its not something Ive done a lot of, as tbh where I live the scenery doesnt change that much. Ive taken a series of photos before to try and stitch later, but without having a tripod the results have always been pretty poor.

However, I will be taking my tripod with me in the lakes.

What I want to know is, is it better to take lots of pictures panning slowly, or just a few covering the whole area?

EG, 3 pictures (left, centre, right) just joining up, or say 7-10 pictures? One will have less stiches/seams in it, but I guess the other might stitch together much more smoothly? Is there a golden ratio or anything?

Oh also best to take pics in portrait if you can... otherwise you can end up with a very thin and long pano, just gives you the flexibility of more height, so you dont lose too much in cropping.

Another tip is to set exposure manually, so every shot has the same exposure.

They should overlap a bit, 1/6th to 1/3rd.

Just been recomented a program called deep zoom which is free from MS. Very positive reviews from a friends. The attached image was made from 8 photos using a Sony T7.


EDIT: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=457b17b7-52bf-4bda-87a3-fa8a4673f8bf&displaylang=en

I use Hugin, the latest version has some pretty good automatic features and the best stitching of anything Ive used.

I always take photos overlapping ~50%, so that I could probably get away with ditching every second one and still have a panorama.

Its also important to consider distortion and paralax. Distortion you can solve by setting your lens properly, for example if you are using the kit 18-55 on a DSLR, set it at about 35mm. The kit lens (particularly the Canon one) isnt very good, but in the middle of its range stopped down to F8 or so it will take a nice picture with relatively little distortion.

Now, paralax is all about how you rotate the camera. Ideally you would use a tripod with a proper pano head on it, but if you dont have one of those what you need to do is rotate the camera around the nodal point of the lens. With my panos, I usually just stick my thumb in the middle of the grippy bit at the back of the lens (where the aperture ring would be for those of us who know what an aperture ring is!) and rotate around that as best I can.

The accuracy of the point of rotation matters more the closer the closest subject is to you. Another good trick is if theres a close up subject (say a person in front of a distant mountain range) arrange it so that the person is in the middle of a frame and you should be able to hide the paralax by picking your blend points accordingly.

good luck, and when in doubt take more photographs. Hugin is very good at smoothing out small errors if it has enough pixels to play with.

only the very best compact lenses can rival even the worst SLR glass, Id take the Canon + kit lens over any compact every time. Even if youve got Leica glassware on your compact, the extra control and reduction in automatic processing easily outweighs any disadvantage you may have with the kit lens. Also remember that the kit zoom is considered poor only by comparison to other more expensive SLR glass. In the middle of its range at a medium aperture (F8 is a good bet with most consumer lenses) it is perfectly adiquate.

Theres only one situation in which Ive ever chosen a compact over a DSLR for quality reasons. That was, before I bought my Macro lens, my Lumix digital compact produced better close up shots than my DSLR. Now that I have a good macro lens this is no longer true.

Another couple of tips for shooting panoramas which I forgot to mention before

You want all the frames to come out near as possible the same exposure, colour cast etc. Therefore, keep all the settings the same. Pick the main frame (unless theres a good reason otherwise, I usually go for the middle!) and set your camera to manual everything, exposure, focus, white ballance, the lot. At this point youll have to forgive me as Im not familiar with the control interface on a Canon camera, but with my Pentax I can hit the "Green Button" in manual mode to give me the program line correct exposure settings. I also often use AF to focus and then switch to MF when Im ready to start shooting.

You then take all the frames on exactly the same exposure, focus and white ballance. This will make blending them easier as they come out more or less exactly the same brightness, colour and scale (changing focus actually changes the magnification slightly, how much varies from lens to lens).

Modern stitching software can cope with small differences in colour cast and brightness between frames, but I always think its best if it doesnt have to.

hope this helps!!

Id give it a try before you go away if I were you.

Just a very very quick test.

Literally, as I was cooking dinner at the time. Grabbed camera, spent 5 mins trying to remember how to adjust aperture in full manual, went out back and took 7 shots.

Now whilst avoiding washing up, I installed and pretty much followed the buttons/instructions...opened the images...aligned...(click the image a couple of times trying to figure out how to zoom in or things and ended up needing to realign everything!) and saved. Cropped the edges back and hey presto:


(7 photos stitched above)

Needless to say I am impressed. Even though I havent a clue how to use hugin beyond the basic automatic default stuff, it seems to do a much better job at aligning than photoshop, even if it does take 5x as long to do it.

Now all I have to do is take my time taking decent shots at the right exposure etc. I guess having them in raw format will give me some freedom for when i get back changing exposure etc.

Thanks for the help guys, I was worried Id go up to the lakes and waste the whole week taking crappy shots (probably still will) but now at least I am armed with a little knowledge on how to improve them a little!

I think Ill use my walking stick, and try to rest the lens on the top of the handle somehow, and pivot around that. At least now I know I can do panoramas without really bad stitching, will just end up taking sh*tloads of photos of each good spot and aligning them all later. Have my laptop to download images to each day so memory wont be an issue