Panoramic Photography

I took this one a few months back up in Whitby (the abbey was behind me in this shot). There are a few important points to remember when getting panoramic photos.

• Always shoot in portrait mode, this gives more height to the finished shot.
• Set your tripod level with the horizon, some tripods have a spirit level on them if not you can get hotshoe mounted ones for a few quid.
• Shoot in manual keeping your aperture, shutterspeed, iso, focal length, focus point and white balance the same for each shot. Meter from where the middle of your panorama will be, if you meter from the sunny side everything else will be underexposed, if you meter from a relatively dark area you risk over exposing the brighter bits.
• Keep an overlap of about 30%, so if you are panning from left to right look for a feature, such as a tree that is about a third of the way in from the right then when you pan your tripod right, frame so that tree is on the left of the shot. That sounds more complicated than it is.

If you get these basics right you should have a good set of say 4-8 photos that can be stitched using CS3. Photoshop has a really good automatic stitching program (file - automate - photomerge) there are other programs such at PTGui that do a good job too. This panoramic was taken at f/16, 1/4 sec, 43mm at ISO100 I had an 0.9ND grad filter to balance the sky. The file has been drastically reduced so it has a smaller size.

Paint with Light

This is a technique called painting with light where you leave the shutter open (bulb mode) on you camera and just use a light to set where you want to expose, the light in this example was just a little pen light but you can do the same sort of thing in fields at night with torches to illuminate say, rocks or trees. In this picture of my epiphone and amp I just opened the shutter and traced round the edges of each element, i.e. body, strings, amp etc. This created multiple exposures which I then combined in photoshop (I believe I set the blend mode to screen to keep only the lightest parts). A tripod is essential as neither the camera or the subject can move during any of the exposures and obviously the less ambient light entering the room the better.