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I've done a couple of panos in my time, some with my old Oly 2100UZ, and some with my Canon Ixus 400... With various levels of success. This is the official first pano I've attempted with my D70s.

- Benro C128 & KB-1 ballhead
- Mounted portrait-style using an RRS L-Plate
- 5 vertical images, approx 15' rotation between them.

After a lot of fiddling with Hugin, a fabulously priced (ie: opensource and free) GUI for Panorama Tools, I managed to get the following:



You don't want to see the 5 failed (and occasionally hilarious) pano attempts with botched settings! It doesn't look very "pano-like", but that might be beacuse it's only 5 vertical images.. or that the subject material doesn't lend itself to pano-making.. whatever. I thought it was a reasonable effort. I had to healing brush the crap out of the sky though, it was having issues blending the colours in. I suspect it may have something to do with my CPL causing uneven colour in the sky.

Also discovered how frustrating it is to get both the legs AND camera level so the panning doesn't throw everything out of whack.

Well done, it looks well stitched together. What did you use to stitch them? There are some great panorama maker programs out there.

I like the picture, but I think that it would look better if the horizon was on the top 1/3 line rather than in the middle. Just my 2 cents.

I would have gone for less sky and more trees. The stiching looks seamless - nice job.

Looks like a good merging job, sky looks nice and smooth...

Looks like a great spot, would adjust the cropping to make the horizon higher in the frame though as the sky doesn't have much texture and would make the foreground more prominent...

I'd tend not to use the CPL when doing pano's as that'll make the sky difficult to blend as you found...

Good job on the joining, looks good...

good first pano.
Nice shot too.

Steve

Thanks for the feedback guys - I definitely see your points about applying the old Rule of Thirds to the horizon. I was so busy trying to get the thing level that I didn't think about that

Gives me something to think about for my next pano, whenever I get a chance to go out and do another one.

I am also finding the sky the hardest thing to stitch in pano's. The rest of the photo can look perfect, but there is still a slightly darker shade at the stitch line in the sky. If anyone has a secret (apart from hours with the healing tool) I'd love to hear it.

suzanneg wrote:I am also finding the sky the hardest thing to stitch in pano's. The rest of the photo can look perfect, but there is still a slightly darker shade at the stitch line in the sky. If anyone has a secret (apart from hours with the healing tool) I'd love to hear it.

G'day,

There's a few ways you could try to make the blend between the merged images osftner or more gradual, which tends to smooth things out a bit...

Try this way and see if that helps

http://www.dslrusers.net/viewtopic.php?t=15434

There's other things you can do to help even out brightness variations between each image if you need to. Are you using photoshop?

Yes using photoshop - but I am at lesson 2!

suzanneg wrote:Yes using photoshop - but I am at lesson 2!

No wuz, I'm only a bit more play time ahead that's all...

I'm assuming your pano consists of each image frame in the pano being in a seperate layer in photoshop, and you're ok with layers, yell out if you're not...

To help even out brightness changes (assuming when you shoot a pano, you use man exp, not a changing mode like aper pri or shutt pri) With the image as layers in photoshop:
- add a brightness adjustment layer above each image layer
- one at a time make each layer active then...
- menu item: layer, Create clipping mask, on each layer
A clipping mask only affects the layer directly beneath it, so each brightness adjustment layer effectively only adjusts that frame of the pano... Helps heaps...

Then pick your brightest frame and adjust each neighbouring frame's brightness adjustment layer to match in... One way then the other, working fom the middle out is just my habit...

Give that a go... Yell out if you need more...

Cheers.