Panoramas from Glen Coe

These ones are coming out of the camera thick and fast! We spent a day travelling around the famous photographic locations around Glen Coe in Scotland such as Rannoch moor, BuachailleEtive Mor and the actual glen itself, a great drive and the weather was fantastic, in fact it was probably a bit too nice for photos, certainly at midday when the sun was high. As all the locations are relatively close together I could go back and forth between them which was good, especially at late afternoon/sunset.


The first shot was at the 3 sisters and is a panoramic stitch of about 7 vertical shots taken at 35mm, I've started zooming in more for panoramas if I can. There is an export to panorama function in Lightroom which is pretty good (it takes them straight into photoshop and does the business) but for these panoramas I used a program called PTGui, it allows you to move the horizon about which is handy when you do a panorama without a tripod, or in my case with a tripod but with a bent horizon, as mentioned, this was my first outing with a ball head so I needed to get used to it.

The next panorama is of Glen Coe, it has to be one of the prettiest places in Britain. Again a stitch of about 6 photos, I had to go to 16mm with this one as those mountains are pretty big!

Striding Edge, Lake District

Another one from Saturday. This was a quick and dirty panoramic (non of that tripod nonsense) Camera on full manual with focus set to infinity and about 5 shots taken in portrait orientation with about 33% overlap from one photo to the next. Photomerge in CS4 is so good now it can get rid of any vignetting you might have or any geometric distortions that come with using wide angles. I wanted to use striding edge as a leading line up to the mountain but also wanted to include the tarn to the right. These were all taken at ISO200, 16mm, f/13, 1/125.

Panoramics of the Lake District

A couple more from the same walk as the previous post. These were two panoramic shots of the valleys either side of Catbells, the first one shows Derwent water, Skiddaw, Blencathra and Keswick.

I'm not 100% sure of the name of the name of the other valley but apparently it has a town called littletown that is in some of the Beatrix Potter books. It was in shadow for most of the day so remained frosty, the sun lit up the mountains behind it though. In this shot you can also see Grasmoor and Grisedale Pike (I think).I may have posted Instructions for creating Panoramics a while ago, with photoshop's photomerge script they are really quick and easy. I would always use a tripod just to save any trouble when editing, if you get a bit of a slope your panoramic can quickly become very thin!

Another Little Planet - Leeds

I was in Leeds yesterday trying to do some more 'little planet' shots and came up with this one outside the Queens hotel. I was going to do one from millennium square but it had been closed off because of some concert or festival. These are really quick and easy to do, just set up a tripod and spin round taking snaps, ignoring the bemused look of people who are certain you are tracking them and only them! I used PTGui to join them then in Photoshop make a square canvas and rotate the image 180 degrees and use the polar coordinates filter, and thats it, you might want to clone in a bit of floor or even better take a snap of the floor when you are done and use that.

Circular Panoramic Photosphere

I was just experimenting with a panoramic from Wales, I haven't been doing much shooting lately so I have to play with older photos, it is still only 2 weeks old though. I saw this effect in a recent photo mag and thought I would try it out. This vista is not the best for this technique, the ones I have seen are normally cityscapes, so I must remember to do one next time I'm near canary wharf. The floor of the shot is also an important part, one I omitted on this occasion. I will write a better tutorial when I get a better example.

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.