Tutorial: How to Shoot the Manual Panorama

Initially when I hear the word panorama, I think of a really long picture that is stretched out and is so wide, and while it can look cool it's really hard to find a practical use for it since it's so wide.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about making a manual panorama, which is currently very different from the automatic panoramas your phones or older cameras make. The manual panorama can cure many ailments at once. It drastically decreases lens distortion (think of fisheye lens and how it looks unnatural), drastically increases the quality of the final image, if done correctly it can be in the same aspect ratio of a regular taken photo, and you can capture so much more information than using a really wide lens. It just takes some work, some knowledge, and some horsepower from your editing program. I will be using Adobe Lightroom.

So, all you need is your DSLR, and set it to the manual (M) setting. Now, you want to find the right settings to shoot at. What I usually do is I find whatever the middle of my panorama is going to be, and adjust my settings so the general center will look right. Then, I stop down. For those of you just starting out, stop down means to have your f-stop go to a larger number. For instance, if I had a Canon 50mm 1.8, I would want to stop down to at least f4. This is because with any lens, if you shoot it all the way open, you will have some lens vignetting. Since we are trying to create a solid picture throughout the whole scene, we need each and every photograph to look the same. I usually overlap each photo by about 50%, so the program can connect each photo together. Once you're ready, I signal my later self when the panorama is about to start. If I’m out shooting and have tons of pictures, and I start going through them all deleting the bad ones, I might (and have) accidentally delete one of the first few pictures of the panorama project. I have learned, and as you can see below, I signal the start and end of my shoot with my hand.

Once you have these in Lightroom, you will select all the pictures you will be using in your panorama. Right click, and select photo merge – panorama. I usually use spherical. There will be an option to auto crop. I usually deselect, and then crop it myself later. I usually crop quite a bit, so I can have a photo that is not super wide. If you don't shoot enough photos, you can see what happens in the cropping photo here. That white spot near the middle is what the program couldn't connect. I chose this panorama to show you that even if you do mess up, if it's in a spot you can fix then you should be fine. You just have to crop out the bad part.

BAM. There you have it! An ultra high-definition photo. All you have left to do it edit it. Beware though, since my computer was basically editing 24 pictures at once, your program may slow down quite a bit. Just be patient, it's got a lot to do. The cool thing about this style is that I could print this out as big as my wall and potentially the tip of the mountain would still be super sharp. Instead of one really wide photo, I have about 24 photos in one. I'm not sure about the math, but it seems like it would be about 20x the quality of a regular photo.

This is a shot I took of @jrue right when I was starting photography. All I had was my Canon Rebel T2i and a 50mm lens. For those unfamiliar with this camera, it is a crop sensor so it in essence zooms in the lens, multiplying your lens 1.6x. Therefore, I was shooting on roughly a 80mm lens which is by no means a wide lens. So, I took 24 pictures with Drew standing still and was able to get this shot. I was able to create my own wide lens, while attaining superior photo quality. **The line in the center of the frame is from me not stopping down my aperture, thus resulting in some inconsistency in the frame.

Anyways, thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more!