Pan-o-rama!
In the summer of 2007, a few of my coworkers and I went to a Photoshop CS3 Power Tour seminar in Nashville. During the sessions, I picked up several little tricks that I use in my daily workflow, including using threshold to set black and white points, scuzzy sliders, working more effectively with RAW images, you get the idea. One of the other big things I picked up that day was how to use Photoshop to make panoramas. I had made a couple of panorama images at the paper, but space was always (and still is) at a premium for content, and talking a copy editor/page designer into running a 6 column photo that’s only 4-5 inches deep almost isn’t worth the trouble. CS3 (and CS4) makes panoramas almost (and I do mean ALMOST) effortless, at least on the production end. My first taste of making a panorama with CS3 came when I arrived back to work after the holiday break in 2007. My parents and I had gone to visit my sister, who was a visiting fellow at Cambridge University in England. During our trip we spent a day in Paris. One of the places I wanted to see while there was Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, which happens to be the highest point in Paris. The completed panorama consists of 4 images looking over Paris, and is 43.5″ wide by 9.4″ tall. While I like this one, it’s by no means the end all be all of panoramas, but for a first effort with Photomerge, I can’t complain too much.
Sony DSC-T33, 11.4mm, f4, 1/80, 100 ISO
I think part of the problem with this panorama is the camera. Although I love my little Sony DSC-T33, isn’t the best camera for making a panorama. When you use a point and shoot you are basically the conduit for getting the image on the memory card – you have virtually no control – just when the photo is taken. This summer I finally broke down and bought a camera, a D300, (read my earlier posts for more details) specifically for having much more control on the trip to Las Vegas. There were two places I had in mind for panoramas while in Las Vegas. Freemont Street, the old part of Vegas, now turned into a pedestrian mall complete with a 5 block long LED canopy used for displaying light shows, advertisements, etc., and Hoover Dam. I learned a couple of things while shooting, and then making (with the aforementioned help from CS3 and CS4) the panoramas. First, try not to get any people in the foreground of your images, more specifically, the foreground edge of a frame. On the Freemont Street panorama, there is a man on the right edge of the left side image who, when the image was put together, was missing about half of his body, which required a little bit of fudging on my part to make him a non-ghost in the image. Second, if you are going to shoot a wider panorama, shoot vertically. Doing so will save you a lot of time in the clone stamp department. The Hoover Dam panorama wouldn’t have benefitted as much from shooting vertically, but Freemont Street would have been much better as 7 or 8 vertical images instead of 4 horizontals, mainly because the wider you go, the shallower your panorama. My recommendation: 1-3 photos, shoot horizontally, >3 shoot vertically. Here’s a helpful link on how to shoot a panorama, just keep in mind you can’t always carry a tripod around with you, but the basic principles are the same. Below are the two completed panoramas from my trip to Las Vegas.
Nikon D300, 20-35 f2.8 @ f8, 1/2000, 400 ISO
Nikon D300, 20-35 f2.8 @ f5.0, 1/125, 1000 ISO
