First Published July 29th 2018
I’ve done a couple of panoramas in the past and they are really great when they turn out.
The one i’m going to go through today was a 6 shot wide, Single height Panorama.
I used a 14mm Samyang Lens on a Full Frame Camera.
I think the next one i’ll do will be with a different focal length and more shots, but this one worked out anyway.
The Shooting Process
There is not much to this at all, above and beyond the standard way you would shoot images at night.
Shoot in Portrait Orientation.
Dial in your lens, make sure your exposure is exactly what you want and start shooting.
Move your tripod head around, about 30 degrees for each shot. My tripod has the degree markings, and a dial to perform an accurate movement. If you don’t just see what your overlap is after the first two shots, and if it’s ok, just turn the camera the same amount each time.
The Editing Process
Edit your photos. I use lightroom to edit one of the photos to my liking, and then copy and paste the settings across to the other images. These are Six Images i used.
One of the images with a few of the settings i used. I did also use a brush to mitigate some of the light pollution. The images were all lens calibrated as well.
When the edit was completed, I exported them all as full sized TIFF files ready for going into ICE.
ICE is Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor, and it is a reasonably good piece of software. It is also free to download and use.
I wanted to use this software , as i feel it has a few more options to play with, that make a simple panorama very easy.
Hit New Panorama
Choose your images, and for a single row panorama, just click on a Simple Panorama, and let it auto detect. You can go through and specify on a grid where you want each specific image, but for this, It’s not really required.
It takes a few minutes, but stitches images quite well. You can then choose the Projection you want. Some are very interesting, but for mine, spherical was fine.
I then dragged the image, so the ground was straight. This does distort other areas, but it’s not so bad because you can crop at the next stage.
You can use automatic cropping or manual to how you specifically require. The auto completion is pretty good, but it is something you can do later in a more powerful editing program if you want.
After clicking next you will have your image. You can then save in a variety of formats.
The thing i have done at this point, for Instagram is to split the image into 3, so i can create a pretty nice looking block.
This is an outstandingly simple panorama to do, and it is not the best process by any means. If you are just starting out with large panorama’s it is something to help you get your head into what you need to do.
The next one will probably be done with a 24 or 28mm lens, so there is less distortion. However it will require more images.
There are a huge amount of techniques and and hardware to help you with taking any sort of panorama. This is just one. I will be refining and working on my own methods from here, so look out for further blog posts about this.
Milky Way Panorama over Moira Furnace
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About Me
I’m Gareth, a 38 year old IT contractor, Photographer, Eternal Optimist and Blogger. I have been behind a camera for about 4 years now and love shooting the stars, and anything else for that matter. Learning is the main aim for me.
I am a family man, and strive to be the best i can be in all fields that i put my mind and heart to.