Taking the Pictures

This is me taking a Mosaic with a Canon 20D, the Canon 50mm Prime Lens (very sharp) a CP Filter and a simple tripod.

Capturing images for Mosaics (Multiple Row Panoramas) is not a trivial task, but with a little practice easy to accomplish.

I strongly recommend using a tripod. If you are capturing images with foreground (e.g. a tree, grass ...), it would be a good advice to invest in a panoramic head for your tripod in order to avoid parallax errors. For this tutorial we are keeping things simple though.

If you are paying attention and if you are not trying to take too many shots (that is too many shots to compose into one), you may even be able to get by without a tripod. Especially when you are only interested in single row panoramas. But we are going to be just a little bit more sophisticated.

The first thing you should do is meter across the whole scene with your camera to get a good idea of what the exposure settings should be. I am not going to teach a photography course, so I will assume you know how to do that ;-). I usually try to go for a very large depth of viel (small aperture - large Av) setting, as stitched images seem to demand larger DOF. We are going to use a Tripod anyways.

Next, you set your camera to manual exposure, using the values you have determined in the previous step. If the exposure time is too long, use a remote cable (in the picture above I had plenty of light). Also if your camera supports RAW capture, use it. Trust me on that one. It is especially important, since you do not have to worry about white balance in the field, when you are busy with the images. You can do this later on the computer. If the white balance of all images match, they are easier to stitch seamlessly.

Now, capture your scene one part of the final picture at a time. Just make sure you have enough overlap between images, as this will help you in the stitchin process (20% is more than enough in my experience). Remember for instance a tree that is in one image on the edge and make sure it is in the next one too. You can take as many rows and columns as you want.

Since you are going to capture RAW files, make sure you don't run out of Memory in the Middle of a large composition. This happened to me once or twice when I forgot to back images up to my image tank before starting.

If your camera does not support RAW, you should try using manual white balance to make all images the same color.

Go to Part 2 and see how to prepare your images.

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