Sunrise and Sunset Panoramas

[BruceKingston]

Hi Everybody,

Thought I'd combine the themes of a couple of recent posts. Here are some panoramas from various places around the island of Bali taken either at sunrise or sunset. Criticism welcome.

[roysmith]

Really amazing shots, thanks for sharing!
Panoramas are something I never got right, maybe you can share your technique with us?

[KevinBarrett]

Simply spectacular! I especially appreciate the second picture--I always struggle getting clouds to cooperate with panoramas--they move too much for being so big!

[BruceKingston]

Really amazing shots, thanks for sharing!
Panoramas are something I never got right, maybe you can share your technique with us?

Ummmm, not much technique to share really.

They were all hand held. The first comprised of about ten shots in landscape orientation. To be honest, I can't remember how many shots were involved in the other two and, since I'm writing this from work where I don't have the originals to look at, I can't check. I think the others were about four or five images and they were done in portrait orientation.

All of them were taken with my A900 (which I would sooner give up my kids for than loose ) and a 28-105 lens at F8 focussed one third of the way into the scene (or thereabouts!). I shoot pretty much everything with the A900 in full manual mode and use the live preview to check exposure etc before shooting for real (much to my wife's absolute annoyance because taking a photo is supposed to consist of bringing the camera to your eye, pushing the shutter button and then moving on )

I use photoshop CS4 to put them together, normally in auto mode with geometric correction off but with vignette correction turned on. Once they are in photoshop I use a combination of the the Transform/Warp and the Clone tools to do my own "geometric" correction. Where possible, I try not to do too much cropping and the Warp Tool is great for correcting horizons that aren't straight. The use of the combination of boh the above tools normally means you don't have to throw too much away .

The one thing I can tell you is that I bought an "L" type (I think - it's the one with the grid etched on it - cost me about $AU40) focussing screen for the A900 and that makes things much easier to line up and keep track of when you are doing panos. Well worth the money.

Sorry I can't be of much more assistance than that.

[roysmith]

Thanks, that was helpful. I tried to make some panos and used pretty much the same technique you did, but now I realise I didn't use manual focus, and maybe that's why I had so much trouble putting the pics together. Will try again next time using manual focus

Really amazing shots, thanks for sharing!
Panoramas are something I never got right, maybe you can share your technique with us?

Ummmm, not much technique to share really.

They were all hand held. The first comprised of about ten shots in landscape orientation. To be honest, I can't remember how many shots were involved in the other two and, since I'm writing this from work where I don't have the originals to look at, I can't check. I think the others were about four or five images and they were done in portrait orientation.

All of them were taken with my A900 (which I would sooner give up my kids for than loose ) and a 28-105 lens at F8 focussed one third of the way into the scene (or thereabouts!). I shoot pretty much everything with the A900 in full manual mode and use the live preview to check exposure etc before shooting for real (much to my wife's absolute annoyance because taking a photo is supposed to consist of bringing the camera to your eye, pushing the shutter button and then moving on )

I use photoshop CS4 to put them together, normally in auto mode with geometric correction off but with vignette correction turned on. Once they are in photoshop I use a combination of the the Transform/Warp and the Clone tools to do my own "geometric" correction. Where possible, I try not to do too much cropping and the Warp Tool is great for correcting horizons that aren't straight. The use of the combination of boh the above tools normally means you don't have to throw too much away .

The one thing I can tell you is that I bought an "L" type (I think - it's the one with the grid etched on it - cost me about $AU40) focussing screen for the A900 and that makes things much easier to line up and keep track of when you are doing panos. Well worth the money.

Sorry I can't be of much more assistance than that.

[BruceKingston]

Thanks, that was helpful. I tried to make some panos and used pretty much the same technique you did, but now I realise I didn't use manual focus, and maybe that's why I had so much trouble putting the pics together. Will try again next time using manual focus

One other thing now that I think about it - overlap (and lots of it), you want to overlap each shot about 30% - ie 30% of the content of the last shot should be in the next one. If photoshop is having trouble stitching them together, it is because there is not enough common features in each shot for it to use to align the images. This will manifest itself in photoshop with either a message saying it can't align the images or with some individual shots stitched together and others on another row of the merged image photoshop produces. Sorry if this doesn't make too much sense. If you want, I have a couple of panos at home where I have had the problem so, when I get home I can post screen shots of the result if it helps.

[aster]

Hi Bruce,

Nice indeed. You also have a good and interesting gallery.


Yildiz

[roysmith]

Thanks, that was helpful. I tried to make some panos and used pretty much the same technique you did, but now I realise I didn't use manual focus, and maybe that's why I had so much trouble putting the pics together. Will try again next time using manual focus

One other thing now that I think about it - overlap (and lots of it), you want to overlap each shot about 30% - ie 30% of the content of the last shot should be in the next one. If photoshop is having trouble stitching them together, it is because there is not enough common features in each shot for it to use to align the images. This will manifest itself in photoshop with either a message saying it can't align the images or with some individual shots stitched together and others on another row of the merged image photoshop produces. Sorry if this doesn't make too much sense. If you want, I have a couple of panos at home where I have had the problem so, when I get home I can post screen shots of the result if it helps.

Good advice, I wasn't overlapping that much, just left a tiny border in common. Will do that and switch to MF next time, thanks!