Morro Bay, California Fog/Moody

7 Shot stitched panorama

Canon EOS 5D Mk II, EF 70-200mm f/4L, hand-held

Stitched and optimized in Adobe Photoshop CS4

Took a friend out shooting yesterday during the class dinner break. We weren't blessed with the best light for shooting birds but the moody feel made for some good panos and landscape.

As you know I shoot panorama all the time but my friend from Michigan had never shot one. We had a quick five minute tutorial and then shot the segments. Our tripods were in the car so we broke some of the rules and shot hand held. We can overcome the problems of hand held by following a couple rules.

-Use a telephoto lens. There are normally fewer parallax problems with telephoto so not as much need to sweat the entrance pupil location.

-Keep the shutter speed fast enough. The basic rule of thumb is to shoot with a shutter speed equal to or faster than 1/focal length (we shot at @100mm so our shutter speeds were at least faster than 1/100.

-Shoot horizontal panoramas with a vertical/portrait camera orientation and vice versa

-Shoot with sufficient overlap. 30% for telephoto and 50% for wide angle

Once we returned to the lab, we stitched the segments together in Adobe Photoshop CS4. He had never done this before either but it is very easy. Following the above guidelines, you will have nice source material and everything will stitch easily.

We optimized the image and then printed a 16 x 44 for him to take home on one of our Canon ipf5100 printers.

Fiat Lux!

Hal