Panoramic Photography

WHAT IS PANORAMIC PHOTOGRAPHY?

Panoramic photography has been around for years, only with today’s technology it is much cheaper and easier with digital cameras and computer software. In the days of film cameras to create a panoramic image meant you either purchased an expensive camera or spent hours in the dark room overlapping all images together.  Panoramic photography creates elongated fields of views, which closely matches what we see with our own eyes which gives a more natural way to photograph a landscape. But with the stitching images together you get a much wider view of the scene.

The way to create a panoramic image is to take a series of images of the view you want, e.g landscape. Whilst overlapping the images slightly as you take them approximately by 30%. This will enable you to stitch the images together in photoshop and will also give you a higher resolution. You can do this by holding the camera but using a tripod will help you get better control on the framing of images. Keeping the tripod level along with the camera, will ensure your panoramic images won’t have any gaps in the top or bottom as you go along the whole image. To help with taking the images you must remember not to change your camera settings in between shots, as this will give you different exposures throughout the image. So to get one exposure along the image set everything manually. 

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IMAGE STITCHING:

Image stitching or photo stitching is the process of combining multiple photographic images with overlapping fields of view to produce a segmented panorama or high-resolution image. Commonly performed through the use of computer software, most approachers to image stitching require nearly exact overlaps between images and identical exposures to produce seamless results. Although some stitching algorithms actually benefit from differently exposed images by doing HDR. Some digital cameras can stitch their photos internally, image stitching is widely used in today's world in applications such as:

• Image stabilisation 
• High resolution photo mosaics in digital maps and satellite photos
• medical imaging
• Multiple image super resolution
• video stitching
• object insertion

I attempted this technique myself and it is a a lot harder than you actually anticipate, The factors to remember are try to keep the image as level as possible which proves much harder to do. The weather plays a huge factor in making these images too, When I did my first attempt it was up on the top of the car park over looking the bbc round about. It was a cloudy grey day I then went into market square and the weather changed dramatically with bright clear sunshine to then changing again to black clouds and rain. So with these factors going off to create a seamless even exposure through out the image is pretty difficult. I can imagine that these kind of images are done on a sunny day or a cloudy day at around noon when the sun is at its highest so you get a an even exposure across the image with no distinctive shadows and shades. 

To piece my panoramic image together I opened up photoshop and created an A3 size document multiplied the width by 6, this will allow enough space for the images to slot in. I then opened another A3 size document this will be to resize my images so the fit perfectly into the panoramic A3 doc. I then transferred then one by one onto my first A3 doc and lined them up to creatae the image. I failed quite badly as I overlapped my images too much instead of sticking to around 30%.