Panorama Archives - Infrared Conversions, IR Modifications & Photography Tutorials

Step By Step Guide For Creating A Stitched Panorama Shot In Lightroom

Sometimes the epic landscape that you see in front of you cannot translate into a photo. It might be the scale or even the depth. At other times the scene might just be too big for your camera to capture in one photo. Even if you have never heard of stitched panorama shots you will no doubt have seen them. So fear not, capturing a panoramic shot isn’t difficult. Here is a step by step guide for you to follow.

Why not just crop?

You may be wondering why you can’t just take a photo with a wide-angle lens and crop it to look panoramic. There’s no reason that you can’t do this and in fact, I would encourage you to crop your photos to bring the best out of them. The big issue with cropping a panoramic shot is to do with the size of the final outcome. This is because when you crop your photo you are removing pixels. So then if you wanted to make your photo much bigger the overall quality will be less. But the real reason is as mentioned above for times when you want a greater angle of view than what your lens can capture.

This a normal shot cropped. As you can see you don’t have the same wide-angle of view.

Step 1 – Focus your shot

The first step once you have a scene in front of you is to focus on your point of interest. For a landscape scene where you need a greater depth of field you need to select a small aperture (f/number). Now, this is the important part. When your camera has focused on your point of interest, select manual focus. This is so that the camera doesn’t then try to re-focus in between shots as typically you are going to need around 3 photos. So, you want to have the same plane of focus for all your shots. Once your camera is in manual focus mode take care not to change the focus.

Step 2 – Shoot your shots

Typically, you will need at least 3 shots for a panoramic photo. Start from the left and take a photo. Then the centre and finally the right. You should be looking to point your camera at 10 o’clock, 12 and 2. Ideally, you should aim for around one-third overlap from each image. You can, of course, take more shots if you want to but usually, three will work fine. It is important to remember that your angle of view should be roughly from 10 to 2 o’clock. Any wider and the distortion might too significant for the panoramic shot to work.

TIP: You might find it easier to find a set of photos for a panoramic shot in amongst all your other photos by bookending them. To do this take a picture of the ground before your first shot and after your last one. Then when you look at the set of photos you can easily see which sets belong together.

Step 3 – Merge the photos

The next step is to import your photos into Lightroom. Once you have them in Lightroom you have can either edit them by adjusting colours, brightness, contrast and so on each photo. They need to all be the same so edit one and copy your settings to the others. Or alternatively, you can create your panoramic shot and then edit your photo after.

Here’s the best part. Lightroom can create your stitched panorama straight in the application without you having to do much. Simply select all of the photos that are going to be in your panoramic shot by clicking the first photo, then holding “shift” and selecting the last photo.

Then right-click on your photos and you will see a pop-up menu. Select “Merge to panorama” and you will see a further pop-up menu appear.

Select the type of stitching that you want Lightroom to apply. You can click through the different options to see which gives you the best result by looking at the preview. Once you have chosen the one that works the best press “OK”. Lightroom will then automatically merge the photos together to create your panoramic shot.

TIP: You can pull the “wrap to edges” slider for Lightroom to automatically extend the edges of your photo to give you a fuller image.

Once you have merged the photos together you can then edit the photo as you please (if you didn’t process the photos individually earlier).

You can also shoot vertical

Another good tip when you are taking your panoramic shots is to turn the camera and capture vertical image instead of horizontal shots. This will give you more height in your final image. But keep in mind that you are going to need to capture more photos (minimum of five to seven). This is a worthwhile technique when you have a high object such as building in your scene.

So, there you have it. How to create a stitched panoramic shot in just three steps using Lightroom. Try it next time you are looking at a beautiful vista or an epic scene. Because there is nothing that looks better in a panoramic shot than a beautiful wide-angle landscape scene to wow the viewer.

Manual Panorama Assembly

The weather is perfect, the lighting is just right and you’ve just finished shooting a 3 frame panorama of an interesting scene. You’re anxious to get home and assemble the images. So you grab a cup of coffee, load up your images and proceed with the panorama assembly. Then the reality hits you that you didn’t shoot the panorama in manual and the auto-assembled image looks unusable. What can be done to save this panorama? There are probably many programs out there that do a better job with assembling panoramas than Photoshop. But I use Photoshop and have saved many panoramas in the way I’m about to describe.

I made a similar mistake on a panorama of an interesting shot while in Norway. Could I re-shoot it? Maybe. But many compositions are once in a lifetime shots that can never be duplicated. I processed my images and was disappointed with the result. Below is the result of how Photoshop’s auto panorama routine handled my files of unequal exposure. I’ll show how to get a better result than this using a manual technique. Stemming from my astrophotography, I learned how to do manual panorama assemblies which can sometimes salvage shots that can’t be assembled properly by Photoshop.

Let’s get started. Fire up Photoshop and load up your pano images in separate layers. You can do this manually by opening up each image and doing a Select All and the Copy/Paste. But I like to use the script Load Files Into Stack.

When you’re done you should end up with something looking like this, with your pano images in separate layers (lower RHS).

The images then need to be aligned for the panorama. This too can be done manually but using the Auto-Align Layers is generally the easiest and fastest option. It generally does a very good job. Highlight all the layers in the Pano and click Edit then Auto-Align Layers. I usually just choose the Auto option and let the computer do its work. On my antique mobile workstation and with my 5DII images and Photoshop CS5, this takes a while. When it’s done, you’ll probably end up with something that looks worse than what Photoshop assembled. But be patient.

Having the image in layers like this gives us considerable flexibility to manually blend the layers to produce a usable image. You first might make some curves or levels adjustments, to try to match the brightness of the various layers. It won’t be perfect, but the closer the better. You can also arrange the layers changing which layer is on top. This helps to find the best overlap to aid in the manual blending process.

The magic occurs when the various layers are masked to manually blend the image. The secret here is to use the image that is covering the majority of the scene and manipulate the masks so that it blends the various elements of the image, letting through the images below. Add a layer mask to this layer and then invert the mask (so it’s black). Choose a medium sized paint brush and paint the mask in white to reveal the areas of the image below that you want to see. I start with masking the layer that has the most features that most need hiding or blending. It takes a little practice to see what needs to be hidden and what needs to be revealed and which layer is best on top. But try several arrangements and choose the best result. Below is the result of my layer swap.

Here’s the same image that’s partially masked using a small paint brush with soft edges.

Continue to paint the various features to hide and reveal the areas of the image that provides the best blending. I use a smaller brush with soft edges in a jagged path in areas of finer features. I also like to paint little features so that they lie entirely in one or the other frame. On this image, the crane hook is a perfect example. It split the frame. But whenever possible these important features should lie on one frame. So try to blend the image accordingly. After a little work and experimentation, the image should begin to come together. Here’s what part of my mask looks like.

Depending on your image, you’ll need to duplicate this process on several layers to encompass the entire scene. Sometimes I’ll also do a little blurring of the mask, to help blend the masking even more. It’s not always needed but can sometimes be helpful. If you mask too far and hit the edge of the image below you can step backwards or paint it over again with a black mask color to hide it again. If you’re not familiar with Masking in Photoshop, I’d encourage you to do a little research. There are many masking techniques that can be used and help with manually blending the panorama.

When you’re happy with the image, you can flatten the layers and proceed with the rest of your processing needs. The image I used in this tutorial is a custom white balanced IR image. I generally convert these to B&W, add a little contrast, touch-up and complete the image. Here’s the final result of this panorama.

If your panoramas have a larger exposure difference between frames, you’ll need to do more work on the front of the process. When I forget to shoot my pano’s in manual mode, the resulting exposure difference is usually pretty small and this process works well. This is certainly not a catch-all process. But I can typically generate better results with my manual method vs. what Photoshop does with the automated assembly.

I’ve also use this manual blending technique on a very large 8 frame panorama of the Orion Nebula (over 63MP). The automated results were nowhere close to what I wanted. So I had to manually assemble and blend this image. So the next time you have some panorama images that you thought might not be usable, try a manual panorama assembly and see if you can recover the image into something usable. Happy shooting (and processing).

Southwest IR Photography

Like many other things in life, we think the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I enjoy digging through forums and seeing photographs of other photographers. I used to think that all these photographers had better subjects for photography. This is especially true when I got into IR photography. IR seems to do best with lots of greenery in the scene, or that’s what I used to think.

Living in the desert southwest, we don’t have much greenery. What we do have is lots of dust, rocks and cactus. When I first got started doing IR photography, I envied people that lived in greener locales. But that’s no longer the case. IR photography is so much more than the iconic white foliage on trees. After shooting IR for several years, I found that it is a great tool for any scenery.

During my early IR photography experiments, I tried the color swapping techniques. But I always returned to my B&W versions. I find it much more challenging to get an interesting B&W photo. I began to have an interest in B&W images with my astrophotography. It happened sort of by accident. I live in an area with fairly heavy light pollution. So it was much easier to shoot B&W images using a specific narrow bandwidth filter (called Hydrogen Alpha).

My IR photography spun off of my astrophotography, since modified cameras are sometimes also needed for shooting nebula. I started with the iconic photos of trees with white leaves and liked the results.

Shooting IR photos limited me to summer photography. So I began to experiment shooting in the fall and winter. It was then that I saw that IR had a lot of potential for B&W. I also learned what looks good in IR photos and began looking for other subjects. Not a leaf in sight in this photo.

IR is also great for adding interest to what might otherwise be considered junk. I shot this through a broken window of an abandoned building. I wasn’t expecting much from this photo, being hand held in a dark environment. It was windy & raining. I was holding an umbrella and my tripod wasn’t tall enough to reach the height of the window. But I loved the result.

We can have some fairly ugly weather here in the desert. Spring brings us wind, and a lot of it. At times the wind is strong enough to pick up the dirt. Voila, dust storm. I wouldn’t advocate taking your camera gear out in a dust storm. For those willing, there are some interesting shots to be had. This is probably one of my all-time favorite IR photos. Ironically, it was also one of my first. There was no live view focusing. The camera wasn’t focus calibrated (link here for focus calibration) and I had no tripod. To make matters worse, the camera I used was a first generation 6.3MP Canon 300D (Digital Rebel) that I had converted on my own to full spectrum, not something I’d recommend.

This was a shot that I probably could not have done at any other time. Behind the tree is the rest of the city, roads and mountains. Some years later, the tree looks much different (with broken branches and its age showing). It also didn’t take long to find out that IR photography is great for landscape shots.

IR is also a fantastic tool for shooting clouds and inclement weather. So when other photographers are heading home, I’m usually heading out. It seems these days that my preference is to shoot IR in poor weather.

IR photos also seems to bring out the old-ness of subjects. I really enjoy shooting old, rundown buildings or vehicles. IR makes these attractive subjects even more interesting.

Modern subjects seem to be just as attractive in IR. Combining the subject and the poor weather is always nice.

Although not really limited to IR, I find that shooting Panoramas gives my IR images a little punch, and also the ability to print them larger. There’s also the combination of all the techniques. It keeps the excitement in photography and the challenge in IR photography.

Nearly every IR photographer starts out by shooting the iconic white foliage. I’m no different. It’s what you do after this that makes IR so interesting. Most hang up their IR cameras and move on. For me, it’s basically started my photography world. I spent the last 40 years doing regular photography and the last 5 shooting IR. I’ve enjoyed the latter so much more. You may not think that you live in an area best for IR photography. I challenge you to find and shoot the subjects that you have in your area and make the most of them. You never know what emerges from the seemingly uninteresting.

Medium Format Lenses on a DSLR

It’s no surprise that photography equipment is expensive. Think of the engineering and workmanship that goes into lenses and DSLR bodies. As with everything, there are always levels of expense. Lets examine lenses specifically. The professional-class lenses tend to have fewer issues. Yet, trade-off’s always exist with either professional or consumer glass. So we spend our time and money looking for the best equipment for our hobby or profession. Sometimes the limitation is money and sometimes it’s just the lack of that ideal piece that we need. For those willing to sacrifice some modern features there may be options to get top-quality glass at a fraction of the cost of similar modern equipment.

Here’s a Gerbera Daisy, shot with a medium format 55mm lens

As a photographer, I’m always looking for an edge, especially with my infrared images. As an engineer, I’m digging into the technical details of my photos & equipment. I always look for ways to improve my set-up. Many IR photographers have their cameras converted to dedicated IR use (with a fixed internal IR filter over the sensor). These converted IR cameras can be calibrated to autofocus in IR so they shoot just like a stock camera. The viewfinder can still be used for framing. However, for folks that use an external filter on full-spectrum cameras (like me) this is not an option. Longer wavelength filters block the viewfinder from transmitting visible light. So I always use the camera in live-view mode and use the LCD and a loupe to focus my lenses manually. Since the same sensor that records the photo is also producing the live-view image, framing and focus are easily managed. I always manually focus my IR images using this LCD technique. It gives me confidence that my images are, at least, focused.

In addition to photography, I have spent many years doing serious astrophotography. Several years back I had read about astrophotographers coupling medium format lenses to cooled CCD cameras. I wondered why these lenses so popular with astrophotographers. Beyond the obvious point of getting a wider view of the sky, a quick examination of the physical layout quickly made it clear. Medium format lenses are used primarily because of their longer flange-to-focal plane distance. On many Astro CCD set-ups filters, guides and other equipment can lie between the telescope and the camera. As an example, look at my wide-field (530mm) astrophotography set-up below. See all the equipment between the camera (box on the LHS) and the telescope? If you remove the telescope and replace it with a lens, this lens would require a fair distance between where it mounted to where it focuses.

Below is an example of how a dedicated medium format astro set-up is constructed. A custom machined the lens mount and motorized focus mounting bracket hold the medium format lens for coupling to the CCD. This assembly is then attached to an equatorial mount, in place of or in addition to a telescope.

(Image courtesy of Craig & Tammy Temple)

All the astrophotography work had me wondering how medium format lenses would work on a DSLR. They work very well. Some significant advantages exist when using medium format lenses on a DSLR. The largest advantage is cost. These lenses are seen as obsolete. So many of the older manual focus, medium format lenses are available quite reasonably. With a little research and patience, some excellent deals can be had. I use the Pentax 67 format, but many others should work equally as well.

Another advantage has to do with the film size of medium format cameras. Pentax 67 is a later version of the Pentax 6×7 format. This format came from the film size of 6 x 7cm. That’s a whopping 60 x 70mm. A standard DSLR full frame image format is 24 x 36mm. Medium format lenses will overfill a full frame sensor by a substantial amount. Why is that a big deal? Well, think about your lenses. Most of the bad things that happen to images occur on the fringes of the frame (chromatic aberration, coma, vignetting, etc). With a medium format lens, you’re shooting through the sweet spot. I was pleasantly surprised at the image quality of the vintage medium format lenses that I tried. I have some decent professional DSLR glass. But any of the medium format lenses that I’ve purchased give equal or better results. Here’s an example, a 2 frame panorama shot with a medium format 55mm prime lens.

This is a heavy snowfall in the desert of Far West Texas. In the distance are the Franklin Mountains that run through El Paso, Texas

Using a medium format lens has another advantage. If you understand how tilt-shift lenses work you may see where I’m going. With an OEM tilt/shift lens overfills the sensor. This allows the lens to be shifted and the image to still fall on the sensor. With a normal lens, the image will shift off the sensor or become heavily vignetted. For the price of one shifting adapter, you can shift any of your medium format lenses. If you read my blog last month you’ll know that I prefer to shoot panoramas with a shift lens. For fraction of what I paid for the spectacular Canon EF-24mm TS-E Tilt/Shift lens (also manual focus, by the way), I purchased an adapter and a small fleet of medium format prime lenses.

This is a 3 frame panorama of northern Norway, shot with my Canon 5DII, a 55mm Pentax 67 lens and a shift adapter (see below).

This is a Canon 5D Mk II coupled to a Pentax 67 55mm lens using a shift adapter.

A test shot using my 150mm Pentax 6×7 lens (my oldest medium format lens)

It’s not all roses, though. Most medium format lenses are huge. I mean huge, and they are heavy. They are generally much larger than their 35mm format counterparts. However, the size is what provides that impressive image circle.

A monster of a 55mm lens and probably one of the sharpest lenses I’ve ever used, in any format.

A disadvantage (for some folks) is that the older medium format lenses are all manual focus. So you have to be comfortable with shooting manual focus on an IR camera (and understand manual camera operation if you plan to do Pano’s). If you have an IR shooting style like mine, using a manual focus lens is inconsequential. I manually focus my AF lenses for IR anyway. You’ll also need to purchase an adapter (either fixed or shift) to interface to a DSLR. Finding the proper adapter for your camera and preferred lens brand may also be difficult. You also have to do your research to get the lenses that have the best image quality. Just like modern AF lenses, some were lemons and some were stars. I only pick medium format lenses that have the best reviews for image quality or sharpness. Finally, since many of these lenses are older you have to look out for dust, grease and fungus on the optics. I usually try to purchase the latest model of the particular focal length lens. So do your research, ask questions and shop carefully.

If you can get through all the details and decide to try shooting with medium format lenses, you’ll definitely have some seriously nice glass. You also get them for a fraction of what a similar modern lens might cost. Hopefully, my experience will shine a light on the pros and cons of using medium format lenses on a DSLR. If you’re up for a little challenge, give a medium format lens a try. You won’t be disappointed.

Shooting Infrared Panoramas

Panoramas are the ideal tool for capturing scenes with expansive views or to increase the field of view of a lens. They are also a lot of fun to shoot. However with the excitement of shooting a panorama comes the frustrating reality of assembling the images into to single frame. Without some proper shooting techniques this assembly process can be hit or miss.

Anyone that has tried to assemble panoramas in Photoshop (or a similar image processing program) is aware that some aspects of the individual frames of the panorama don’t always match. This is caused by parallax errors of near and distant objects. With these images there is usually some compromise to the assembly. So some of the image parts will match and other parts may not. These parallax errors are most problematic where the scene has close foreground objects as well as distant objects in the background. So what can be done about this?

Well, lets first look at the problem, parallax. You can easily see the effects of parallax by setting up a couple objects on a counter top, in line with the camera. Place one object closer than the other and aligned so that the object closest to the camera hides the object further from the lens. Now pan the camera and notice the effect. This effect is seen because the camera is not being rotated around the optical node of the lens.

So how do we fix this problem? The use of a nodal slide will allow you to rotate the camera around a predetermined nodal point. The nodal slide allows you to offset the camera so that the axis of rotation is around the optical node (also known as the no-parallax-point or entrance pupil) of the camera lens. Not too many manufacturers publish this information, but it can be determined experimentally. The nodal point will differ from lens to lens and also at different zoom settings on the same lens. To properly use a nodal slide you’ll need a tripod and a head with a panning base (or separate pan head). Below is an example of a nodal slide set up with my 5DII. Although I machined this one, they are available many places at very reasonable prices. Note the blue tape that has information on the location of the nodal point for various lenses. My preference is to use a set-up with an L-bracket attached to my camera. However nodal slide set-ups can be done in many different ways, even on both axes (pan and tilt) for monster panoramas.

Another superb option for panoramas is to use the shift feature of a tilt-shift lens. In my opinion, this produces the best panoramas with the least trouble with assembly in Photoshop. The shift feature of the lens is used to shift the image across the film plane, without movement of the camera itself. Using this technique there are imperceptible levels of parallax. I usually start by composing the scene keeping track of how far the shift feature will frame the field of view. I then shift the lens to one side and begin shooting and shifting. Use care to not move the camera or tripod. One major downside is that a tilt-shift lens can be a pricey solution for panoramas. Another drawback is that it’s typically only possible to shoot up to 3 frames on a full frame camera and maybe 4 frames on an APS-C camera. The use of a nodal slide offers the potential for full 360 degree panoramas, if you ever have that need.

The shot below is a 3 frame panorama shot on a full spectrum modified 50D with a 740nm filter and my 24mm TS-E lens. Without the use of a nodal slide, the parallax errors in this scene would have made assembling this image nearly impossible. The front of the truck is close the camera and the buildings in the background being much further. This would have created large parallax errors and made final image assembly very difficult. But using the shift feature of the lens, the images stitched together without any trouble or compromises.

Now all this being said, there are some situations where panorama shots can be done without any equipment and can even be hand held. But these are mainly done for distant scenic shots where there would be very few problems with parallax. Regardless of what method you use to shoot panoramas, it’s best to overlap the images. I usually shoot with at least 1/4 overlap. It’s also generally best to have the camera in portrait orientation. This will provide the best set of images for final processing.

A tilted horizon can be fairly distracting on a large landscape panorama. So for these I always try to insure that the nodal slide and panning or tripod head are level. Most tripods & nodal slides have a bubble level. But for times where I don’t have a level and can’t see the horizon, I use a $5 hot shoe cube level on the camera. This helps make sure that the horizon is not tilted in the final assembled panorama. Correcting a tilted horizon on a large panorama requires cropping a large portion of the panorama.

Probably the most important point when shooting panoramas is to shoot in manual mode. With the camera in an auto-mode, the camera will typically detect a difference in exposure from shot to shot and adjust the camera accordingly. But having it in manual mode will insure the same exposure for all the shots. The final images will need considerably less work to assemble if there are no exposure variations.

I hope this brief overview has removed some of the mystery and has inspired you to get out and shoot panorama images. I really enjoy shooting panoramas and hope you’ll give it a try. Practice makes perfect. So get out and shoot!