Making photo panoramas is very useful skill of every photographer. City squares, mountain ranges,lakes - they never fit into one shot.
Some automatic cameras have even this function built-in, but since I'm a user of DSLR I'll focus on more professional method.
This is Mariensztat Market. Mariensztat is a very beautiful part of Warsaw, a bit forgotten, a bit neglected but with nice architecture and almost no tourists, although it's 5 minutes walk from Castle Square (this picture taken on Sunday afternoon, when Old Town was full of people). See it on Google Maps
It's perfect place for a rest, for an action of romantic novel or for...making a photo panorama. Moving people are the worse thing that can happen - they will have different position on the pictures and can make panorama stitching software crazy, or at least spoil the final result with a blurred ghost.
When I started to read about panoramas it turned out that I need a tripod and special head. Well - it's sometimes useful, but not obligatory. I've made a lot of nice panoramas without it, and this one was also done directly from hand.
So the basic recipe for a panorama is:
1. Set your camera in to manual mode and measure the light in the lightest part of the area and set the aperture. Use this setting to make all pictures.
2. Turn autofocus off
3. Make several shots covering the area you want to have on your final picture.
Each next shot should begin in approximately 2/3 before the end of the previous to allow seamless merge. To sum up: neighbour pictures must have common part.
4. Google for "panorama stitching software". I use PTGui. You can download trial version from here.
5. In most cases it's enough to load pictures and relay on the program. Software finds common point in the pictures, adjust them and merges into panorama.
6. Finalize result in any photo editing software. Crop, add some contrast, add some saturation and sharpen.
Of course this is not a full detailed description, but Internet is full of it it's no sense to repeat it once again because the objective of this post is of course...to encourage you to visit beautiful Mariensztat!
Some automatic cameras have even this function built-in, but since I'm a user of DSLR I'll focus on more professional method.
This is Mariensztat Market. Mariensztat is a very beautiful part of Warsaw, a bit forgotten, a bit neglected but with nice architecture and almost no tourists, although it's 5 minutes walk from Castle Square (this picture taken on Sunday afternoon, when Old Town was full of people). See it on Google Maps
It's perfect place for a rest, for an action of romantic novel or for...making a photo panorama. Moving people are the worse thing that can happen - they will have different position on the pictures and can make panorama stitching software crazy, or at least spoil the final result with a blurred ghost.
When I started to read about panoramas it turned out that I need a tripod and special head. Well - it's sometimes useful, but not obligatory. I've made a lot of nice panoramas without it, and this one was also done directly from hand.
So the basic recipe for a panorama is:
1. Set your camera in to manual mode and measure the light in the lightest part of the area and set the aperture. Use this setting to make all pictures.
2. Turn autofocus off
3. Make several shots covering the area you want to have on your final picture.
Each next shot should begin in approximately 2/3 before the end of the previous to allow seamless merge. To sum up: neighbour pictures must have common part.
4. Google for "panorama stitching software". I use PTGui. You can download trial version from here.
5. In most cases it's enough to load pictures and relay on the program. Software finds common point in the pictures, adjust them and merges into panorama.
6. Finalize result in any photo editing software. Crop, add some contrast, add some saturation and sharpen.
Of course this is not a full detailed description, but Internet is full of it it's no sense to repeat it once again because the objective of this post is of course...to encourage you to visit beautiful Mariensztat!
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