Travel: Vermont Panoramas

My apologies to my readers, I’ve neglected the blog for a few months. I had already started this set of Vermont panoramas, so to get something out right away I’ll finish it off now. Next month I’ll post some of the photos taken during a recent road trip around Ontario, and then after that we’ll be getting into Top Ten time again. Although I have so many photos to go through it might take me longer than January.

Anyway, a few tips for taking stitched panoramas (or see my previous more in-depth posts on panoramas):

• Make sure you put most settings on manual mode so that nothing changes during the shooting, aperture, shutter speed, white balance, focus point
• Make sure your tripod is level, a bubble level can really help. Not only will this make stitching easier and more accurate, it will avoid tilted panoramas where you lose a lot of the image due to having to rotate it
• Don’t use a polarizer as the effect changes with the angle to the sun
• I would recommend trying to stick to a standard ratio when you crop it, something like 3:1 or 2:1, that way framing will hopefully be easier
• Shoot fast if you have moving clouds in the image, but if you have flowing water I usually shoot with a really long shutter speed to smooth out the flow and hopefully have every shot look the same

Luckily these clouds weren’t moving very much, but if they were, I would have made sure to shoot fast so that they would line up in the final image

This one goes against the recommendation to keep the ratio of length to width at a standard ratio and might make framing difficult or expensive

Here’s an example where a long exposure helps to make sure that water lines up properly; with a shorter exposure you can get timing issues where the flow doesn’t look the same during one split second to the next

Panoramas can allow you to get 180 degree angle views or more in a single shot (I wasn’t able to walk more to the left to get the hill right in the center, but I still like this panorama overall)

The lack of wind helped to get a nice panorama of this reflection without any stitching issues

Here’s an example of why using manual mode is important; the sky was brighter to the right, so as I was rotating the camera the automatic exposure from the camera would have changed from shot to shot

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– Patrick

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