panorama: how to control the light?

[fjhleger]

I find difficult to control the light in such photo. Also, i should had use the camera in portrait mode to catch more height.

Any other suggestions?

Who will throw the first arrow?


please open the link below for the full size panorama.

http://gallery.photographyreview.com...&ppuser=270696

This photo is nice to scroll from one side to the other on a PC, but this looks uggly printed !

[Dylan8i]

id also suggust centering yourself better so that the wall on the right side doesn't slope downward as much. although that is harder than it sounds

[fx101]

If by "the light" you mean the overexposure, what you can do now is mask the picture in PS. Then copy the sky in the right side, put it in a layer below the masked wall and lighten it up a bit. Then you have a nice skyline. Increase contrast, maybe decrease gamma, and maybe run it through a light warming filter. You might get something nice that'll overcome the overexposure if you do that.

[Photo-John]

What camera did you use to take this and what software did you use to stitch the images together?

[Greg McCary]

When shooting Panos you need to shoot in full manual, focus, wb, shutter speed and f/stop. Change nothing as you pan the horizon, overlap 25-50% and get a good stitching program. I don't use a tripod but use the focusing lights inside my 510s viewfinder to line up the horizon. I works fine.

[fjhleger]

Hello everyone, thanks for your comments.

Greg, this was done in A mode, leaving the camera adjusting the shutter speed, and the focusing.

Photo-John, this was done using the E-300 and the wide zoom kit lens (14-45 3.5-5.6). At that time (2 years ago) i was very naïve with digital photography issues. The sticthing was done using autopano Pro. I am still learning it, i may write a review one of these days.

fx101, yes i speak of the over exposure on the left. This is acceptable in the crop you see in this thread, but far more severe in the full 180° panorama. The main issue was that the left part was against the sun under a thin cloud, making the wall dark and the sky very bright, while the right side was blue, radiating far less light.

Dilan8i, I will redo the panorama perspective to try to get the door straight. This is the most disturbing element. For the slanting, well, this is due to the fact this was taken at 28mm effective (14mm lens) and this place is sufficiently big.

If i go there again, i will try to do a better job.


Thanks to all, keep commenting!

[mjs1973]

As Greg said, shoot everything in full manual mode so nothing changes while shooting the pano. A level tripod will help also. When I shoot a horizontal pano, I always take my images as verticals. When shooting a vertical pano, I shoot horizontal images. It gives you much more information to work with, and you can leave some extra room on the sides or top and bottom for cropping once you have it stitched the way you want it.

[MB1]

Sometimes you just have to wait for better light.

Well, that plus making sure that the exposure is the same for all the images in the pano.

[Frog]

Yeah! Shootin in A is going to give you different exposure values via varying shutter speeds. Find the most neutral area, expose for that, and then shoot everything with same settings.

[fjhleger]

This is a corrected image on the geometry side, as for the exposure, there is nothing i can do presently. I have straightened the walls, mainly in the right side.

the large image is under the following link:

http://gallery.photographyreview.com...&ppuser=270696

[Photo-John]

As some other people said, manual exposure mode so that nothing changes. And always expose for the highlights. You can lighten up the shadows later. But you can't do a thing about blown-out highlights.

This looks like you shot it with your lens zoomed wide? Best to shoot panoramics with a telephoto or "normal" focal length. That eliminates distortion and makes the stitching simpler.

[fjhleger]

The focale was 17mm, thus 34mm in 35mm world.
Yes this is wide, but as i said before, this is 180° so it won't print nicely anyway. The problem is the height of the walls, more than 10 meters, 33 feets. i was taking the shots with my back on the opposite wall.
Using Autopano pro, based on the autostitch algorythm make the stitching quite easy. The perspective and verticality control was a little more difficult to obtain, and i was obliged to scan thru the very good tutorial of this tool to understand how to correct my initial geometry.
I recommand to everyone to try this very nice tool (http://www.autopano.net/) . You can use it freely to generate your panorama as the only real limitation of the unregistered version is the unability to save the project, but not the resulting images.
There are plenty tutorial videos how to use it and you can control quite a lot from control point quality to tone matching thru projection mode and lens correction. You can generate PSD and HDR output in addition to JPEG or TIFF.

Of course, as this is a French software, it is probably expensive for the US as it is priced in Euro's.

But, of course, you need not to overexpose your photos as i did in this case:cryin:

[fx101]

Ah... it's a 180 panorama? Yes, go with the manual exposure as others have suggested. Do you have access to the site where you photographed this? If you have a chance to redo it, bracket each shot so you can make an HDR panorama and then shadow/highlight problems will be easily solvable when you put it in photoshop and do tone mapping.

[fjhleger]

I will be not so far away sometime in May, so I may go there if the weather is not too bad: look to my uploaded photos, there is one from the outside quite far away, the castle is just on the top of the center left hill.

I sure will do braketing, now i know how this can be used, and i will take in portrait mode, and i will do two or three passes to have the full vertical display.


Thanks,

[Chunk]

You've gotten good advice for shooting Panos. The only thing I do in addition to Greg's advice is to shoot at a focal length that will give normal perspective to make the stitching easier.

[Chunk]

You've gotten good advice for shooting Panos. The only thing I do in addition to Greg's advice is to shoot at a focal length that will give normal perspective to make the stitching easier.

OOPS! I see PJ had already covered this. sorry...