Shooting Panoramas

This photograph of the Chateau at Chantilly (near Paris) illustrates the simplest way of producing a panorama. It was taken with the Olympus OM4 using a 24mm lens and then cropped to a letterbox format. The horizontal field of view is about 73 degrees. There are several cameras designed specifically for panoramas that have a “flat back” and produce images with rectilinear perspective. Ignoring APS, which achieves panoramic format by masking down an already tiny negative, examples are the Hasselblad X-pan and Fuji GX617. These produce negatives of 24 x 65 mm and 6 x 17 cm respectively. With the exception of the photograph on this page and one or two others, all my panorama photographs on the web site were produced by stitching together several frames from a 35mm Olympus SLR (OM1n or OM4), from the Canon G2 digital camera, or from a digital SLR.

The software to do this is either free or very cheap. I use Panorama Tools and PT Assembler. The advantages of using stitching software (apart from cost) are that you can produce a final output in rectilinear or cylndrical perspective (as appropriate) and PT Assembler produces a layered psd file which can be opened in Photoshop for tidying up. To the best of my knowledge no other stitching software produces a layered psd file.

It is advisable to use a tripod with a panning head, with the camera positioned so that it rotates about the nodal point of the lens. The axis of rotation should be vertical; this can be checked with a spirit level but a final adjustment can usually be made by looking through the viewfinder. For example, in photographing the interior of a building, the centre point of the viewfinder should follow a horizontal line on the wall at the same height as the camera as the camera is panned. In photographing a landscape, two or more features at the same height can often be identified by reference to the OS map.

Table of angles of view (degrees) for various focal length lenses on a 35mm camera (36mm x 24 mm).

Technical Notes

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