Photographing Perfect Panoramas

Produce perfect panorama photos with these easy steps

Hi, my name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this is Coffee Break Photography.

Last weekend I checked out this exhibition at the National Records of Scotland General Register House in Edinburgh. The exhibit had just one item, a huge 25ft wide, 6ft tall reproduction of an old school panorama of 18th century Edinburgh. The story behind it is pretty fascinating.

So back in the mid 1780s a guy named Robert Barker got this brilliant idea whilst chilling on Carlton Hill, and that's one of Edinburgh's Seven Hills by the way. He realised it was the perfect spot to capture a 360 degree view. Barker figured out that if he stood in one place with a square frame and drew what he saw through it, then kept moving the frame around, he could create a complete picture of the view from Carlton Hill. But here's the thing, Barker was great with ideas, but not so much with execution. So he got his 12 year old son, Henry Aston Barker to sit on top of the observatory on Carlton Hill and sketch the scenes. And believe it or not the kid nailed it, his drawings were incredible, especially for someone of his age. I've dropped a link below where you can check out the individual panels.

So Robert then dreamed up this idea of putting all the frames together in a circular room so viewers could feel like they were right there on the hill. After some failed attempts to get funding, they finally made a larger version of the panels in 1788 with the dimensions, you guessed it, 25 feet by 6 feet, and showed them off in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

This father-son duo hit it big, with making panoramic images of famous battles and scenes all over the world. Battles like the Nile, Copenhagen and Waterloo were among their hits. And what's cool is that creating photographic panoramas hasn't changed much since Barker's time in the 1780s. Stick around, I'm going to show you how to nail perfect panoramas using modern methods. So let's dive in.

So here we are in one of the best views in Edinburgh. It's in Inverleith Park which is in the new town of Edinburgh and we're looking across to the old town so we can see Arthur's Seat on the left hand side of the scene all the way through the old town until we get to the castle on the right hand side of the scene. And this is a perfect image for shooting a panorama.

OK so the first step towards taking a great panorama image is to make sure that your head of your tripod is exactly flat. So I've got the legs balanced, I've got the tripod head balanced. If you're using a standard ball head instead of the Platyball that I'm using here, just make sure that everything from the leg to the top is all level because that's going to give us a better pan as we go across the scene.

So the next thing we need to think about when we're taking a panorama image is the orientation of the camera. Two ways we can do this can either have it as a horizontal or as a portrait. Now if you think about the lens, the lens has got a convex front to it and because it's convex that bend appears on the picture that we take on the sensor so we want to try and reduce the bend that appears in the image. So if we shoot portrait the bend is only on the shorter edge so we get less of a bend in the image. So we're going to attach the camera now using this L plate. The reason I use an L plate is because you've got a side on each of the side and the bottom that allows you to attach the camera. So you can either attach it this way or that way. So let's attach the camera and then we can start taking the shot.

So the next thing we need to do is to set the light meter correctly. Now the sun is just over to my right and it's coming over the front of me and over into the scene. So I'm going to move my camera to the lightest part of the scene which as you can see is over where Arthur's Seat is. I'm then going to check the light meter is where it is. So it's slightly under exposed so I'm just going to allow a little bit more lighting by slowing the shutter speed down. And that's us at zero. So we're now ready to start taking the images.

Ok so the next thing we need to think about is where we're going to focus and I'm going to focus for this shot right in the middle of those trees. Now I'm using a process called back button focus which you can see the video about back button focus by clicking here. If you don't use back button focus or you're not comfortable with using back button focus you could also focus the camera once and you could then switch the lens to manual focus so it'll then not readjust as it's going through the panorama that we're going to take.

Ok so now it's time to start shooting. The key to taking great panorama images is to have one part of the image as we pan across from left to right in the next image and that's so when we get into Lightroom we can join them together. So I'm going to start shooting from the left hand side which is where Arthur’s Seat is. Once I've taken the shot you can see that the steeple just to the right hand side of the right hand third is the place where I'm going to move the camera to so that's then on the left hand third and then I can take the shot again. This time it's the floodlight just on the rugby pitches so I'm going to move that camera across again and take the shot. Now if I look there's a steeple right in the middle so I'm just going to move a little bit further to there. This time we've got a really obvious place in the image which is the end of the castle. Move that across, take the shot. I'm going to do one more shot just on the edge of that tree.

Okay and there's the images we're going to use a bit later on to edit once we get into Lightroom.

So now we have the photos taken the next step is to join them together. And to do that, we're going to use Adobe Lightroom. I've transferred the shots from Inverleith Park into Lightroom. So now let's show how we join them together.

OK, so here's the six images in Lightroom. I'm going to select the first of these images, hold the Shift key down, and then select the sixth one. So that's now selected all six of the images. And I'm going to right-click and take the option Photo Merge to Panorama. So Lightroom then goes away, and it's going to join together all these images. You can see it comes up with a pretty good version of it.

You can see there's some projections. So the first projection is one called Spherical. So let's imagine you have a ball, and you cut the ball down the edge, and that would be the equivalent of the spherical projection. It's showing you a ball view of it. Cylindrical, as it says, takes a cylinder, and it's going to open it up. So as you press a cylindrical, it tends to make the image a little bit higher. Perspective probably isn't going to work in this image, but where perspective is used, you see if you've got some buildings, and they're all bending inwards as you've gone across to produce the panorama, it will straighten out all those straight lines and create vertical perspectives. But given the scene we've got, that's not going to work.

And you can see just around the edge of the image here, there's some little gray bits. So those gray bits are where I wasn't exactly right with the way I pan the image from left to right and had it level. So there's two ways we can fix this. The first one is to click Boundary Warp, and if you move it to 100%, you start to see those elements disappear. So essentially what Lightroom is doing is it's warping the edges of the boundary to try and get rid of those elements which weren't collected as we were taking the panorama. So there's a different way we can do this, which is called Fill Edges, and this is going to use a little bit of AI, a bit of autofill. it's going to put what it thinks should be there. You can see quite quickly it comes up with what I think is a pretty good version of it. We could use if we don't fill the edges you could ask it to auto crop so that will just get rid of those images. I prefer to use the fill edges version of it so I'm going to keep that one on. And then auto settings this is essentially the equivalent of pressing the auto button when you're in the develop module. So we're ready to go I'm going to use the cylindrical projection. We're going to fill the edges and we're going to add the auto settings.

Create stack. What that will do is it will create the panorama image for us and then it'll stack behind it all the images that we've used in here. I prefer to keep them separate so I'm just going to click on merge. A Lightroom is going to go away. It takes a few seconds just to produce the panorama. So I'll probably fast forward this part in the actual video.

Okay, so there we have the panorama image, another thing that I think is really clever, although we do have a slight little issue here just to be aware of, is these people are also these people, so as people have moved, it's included them in there, usually Lightroom does quite a good job of identifying the people who've been moving, but because I was talking a little bit, as I was creating the panorama image, it's included the same things in, I think you can say the same with this woman over here.

Now the great thing about producing a panorama image inside of Lightroom is the fact it produces a DNG file. The DNG file is a digital negative, which is Adobe's proprietary DNG format, and that means if, for instance, if we come to things like white balance, we have all the standard options, so if it's this it could change the white balance to a cloudy day, and it just warms up the scene, or we can set it to as all the pictures were shot, and I tend to shoot with a daylight white balance. So there we have it, and once we've got the picture in, obviously you can adjust any items you want, you can increase the brightness, you can increase shadows, and anything such as selecting the sky inside of the mask options, which we've talked about in recent videos, we can also apply all those adjustments to the scene.

So there we have it, a very very quick and simple way of doing exactly the same as used to happen in the 18th century here in Lightroom using panorama technique.

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