today I'm going to show you how to shoot handheld panoramas even though most
cameras have a panorama function it's better to shoot them manually the reason
for this is because normally the auto Panna function saves one big JPEG file
when you shoot them manually you'll have a series of RAW files if you're not
shooting in RAW you should be you'll get much better quality images out of your
camera you will have to process them after shooting them but with a little
bit of practice in the editing software you'll get much better images in
shooting the panorama manually you'll end up with a sequence of shots that
you'll be able to stitch together afterwards depending on how many shots
you've got you'll be able to make the pano
as long or as short as you want you can stitch panoramas together in this way
with pretty much any focal length but I've found it works best when you shoot
between a 24 millimeter and say an 85 millimeter they're straightforward to
shoot and as long as there are no moving parts in your landscape and if there's
enough light to shoot handheld you won't have a problem to shoot the hand-held
panoramas I'd normally have my aperture around about f/8 if the foreground was
really close and have that somewhere between f/8 and f-16 with the shutter
speed I'd keep it to the same number as the focal length so I'd lessen the
likelihood of getting handheld blur this means if I shoot at 25 millimetres my
shutter speed will be 125th of a second or faster if I shoot at 200 millimetres
a shutter speed will be one two hundredth of a second or faster and then
with my ISO I'd have this as low as possible so you do need a good amount of
light to shoot handheld panoramas
the first thing to do is work out where you want your panorama to start and
where you want your panorama to end once I've done this I'll put my camera into
manual mode I'll work out where the brightest part of the panorama will be
and make sure I haven't clipped any of my highlights in that area so if I'm
shooting a really wide panorama I might have a bright section in one part what
I'll do is point my camera at that part and make sure I'm not clipping the
highlights so basically making sure I'm not over exposing the highlights if
you're not sure how to do this click on the I in the corner this will take you
to another of my videos now when you shoot the panorama you want to keep your
feet in one place I tend to put my feet on the ground and then stay in that one
place until I finished the panorama the next thing to do is find your focus
point what I do is normally focus on the infinity point with panoramas because
I'm getting a big wide landscape I tend not to have anything too close to the
camera once you've got your focus you need to switch it to manual focus the
reason for this is you want to keep the focus playing exactly the same the same
with the settings everything needs to be in manual so it stays the same from the
first shot to the last shot so then you're ready to shoot the panorama you
can either shoot in landscape mode or portrait mode I tend to shoot in
portrait mode because it gives me more height in the panorama I'll make a note
of where the horizon is on my monitor and then I'll take that shot I'll make
sure I keep the horizon in the same place on the monitor move and take the
second one I'll then work my way through the sequence until I've got all the
shots I need the main thing is not to move while you're shooting so you'll
take a photo move stop and then take another photo I've ruined a few
panoramas where I've been in a rush to shoot them is either really cold or it's
quite rainy and I've just been rushing through the sequence and I haven't
actually stopped before I took the image so remember take the shot move to the
next point and take the shot again making sure you've got about a quarter
to a half of an overlap between each image this will just mean
that your computer will have things to match up so it can then build the
panorama where's your back home and you've uploaded your images to your
editing software of choice next it's time to stitch them together I'm using
Lightroom in this tutorial if you're using a different editing software just
make sure you know where the panorama functions are if you want to follow
along there's a link in the description to a 30-day free trial once have brought
my images into Lightroom there are a few changes I make before I stitch the
panorama together you can see I've got my sequence here along the bottom
there's a little bit dark but I can bring the colors back up the dynamic
range in the a7 r2 is great this was when I was in Snowdonia over Christmas
so as you can see I've made sure there's good overlaps through the panorama so
I'll select my first image in the develop module select all of the images
then I'll scroll down to the lens Corrections I'll click on remove
chromatic aberration and enable profile Corrections as you can see with this I
was shooting with the Sony 85 millimeter we were on a mountain quite far away so
I didn't have any foreground element but I really liked the landscape so just
make sure you've got this first one selected click on sync check none and
then lens Corrections and synchronize all this does is make sure each of the
images has been corrected for the lens that you're shooting with so once you've
selected them all right click on the images go to photo merge and panorama
Lightroom will then put these images together in a panorama if you haven't
shot enough of an overlap it will say merge was unsuccessful
if you've overlapped them enough it'll stitch them together correctly and as
you can see it's done that now the next thing you need to do is select a
projection so you have spherical cylindrical and perspective spherical is
as if it's projecting the images onto the inside of a ball
cylindrical it's like it's projecting the images on the inside of say a long
tube and perspective it just tries to blend and get all the perspectives right
in choosing one of these is just down to personal taste I normally choose a
cylindrical once you've done that you've got boundary wolf and what this does is
you can see as I started on this side I drifted down a little bit when shooting
this panorama boundary warp gets rid of these white bits so if I put
boundary warp on to 100 it basically warps the image so it uses
all of the pixels that you've taken so as you can see this mountain is higher
than this mountain when I have boundary warp on 0 when I put it on 100 they're
almost at the same level I won't try and keep the true perspective that I saw so
I'll bring it back to that next thing you do is click on Auto crop this just
gets rid of the white bits if you don't like how it's cropped it doesn't really
matter because afterwards you can click on crop and it'll still retain
everything that's outside that auto crop you can click on auto settings if you
want I prefer to change these myself then once I'm done I'll click on merge
once it's processed the file you'll see you've still got all of the raw files
and then you've got this new file which is a panorama it gives you a DNG file so
it's still a raw file and it still got all of that information in it as you can
see I under exposed this area a little bit but I was protecting my highlights I
probably could have pushed it a little bit more but I was erring on the side of
caution you can also see that the image is huge this is about 25 thousand pixels
by 7,200 pixels this might slow down your computer a little bit when editing
the panorama if I click on this crop image you can see I've got all of the
information that was there in the image it saved it as it was but the auto crop
just did this for me instead of me having to do it manually what I am gonna
do is just bring in this side a little bit
because I want the Snowdonia horseshoe to be somewhere in the middle the next
thing I want to do is process this image as normal as a lot of you have asked for
it I am going to be doing a basic editing tutorial soon just be patient
it's in the making if you're watching this in the future then there'll be a
link in the description below and in the top corner and that's about it I'll
normally shoots quite a few different panoramas when I'm out hiking having the
ability to shoot them handheld really opens up your options and it means you
can grab a panorama really quickly so just follow these rules and you'll be
able to do the same if you shoot panoramas in a different way or have any
questions about this process leave a comment below it'll be great to hear
your thoughts as always if you like what you see give me a thumbs up if you
didn't give me a thumbs down and for weekly tutorials hints and tips in
photography and videography subscribe and turn on notifications I'll see you
next time