From time to time I like to get out and photograph Landscapes. Today was one of those times and I ventured to Glendalough’s upper lake. It was a coincidental visit more so than a planned one, had it been planned I would have travelled in the early morning and setup my tripod as the sun came up. Anyhow, sometimes you have to make do with what you have and this is the result of today’s work.
This is actually a panorama of 11images taken in portrait mode, blended together in autopanopro and very slightly processed in Photoshop CS4.

A few things I like to bear in mind when shooting panorama’s. It would be easy and ideal to have the correct equipment to do this with, but qtvr heads are expensive and not always justified.

1. Set your camera to Aperture mode, I like to shoot around F11 for landscape panorama’s
2. Set your White Balance to a fixed setting, usually sunny, cloudy, or something equivalent. Otherwise it may change from shot to shot and then you will have color imbalance, or the tedious task of adjusting individual images.
3. Sweep the panorama looking through the viewfinder, taking note of the shutter speeds the camera is reporting.
4. Switch the camera to manual and dial in your chosen aperture and an average of your shutter speeds. Ensure at this stage that you are shooting in raw, you were already though I’m sure
5. Turn the camera to portrait orientation and shoot some of the individual shots that you will eventually shoot for your panorama, inspect these in camera to ensure that you’re not under or over exposing individual shots.
6. If youre happy(within reason) with the results we will proceed to actually shooting the panorama.
7. On your camera body you should see a line with an arrow pointing to it, this represents the focal plane of your camera and most dslr’s will have this indicated for you, this is important to know for panorama’s.
8. Line up your first shot, Manual Mode with your settings dialled in, Fixed White Balance, Portrait Orientation.
9. Take the shot and move to your next shot, while moving you need to try and swivel the camera and not your body, by swivelling the camera(ideally around the focal point) you will achieve a better result than swivelling your body and ultimately produce less distortion. You need to shoot the sequence of shots quickly, before weather or light conditions change and overlap all shots by about 20-25%, so as you take a shot have a point on the viewfinder that you are going to move to for the next shot.
10. Obviously try not to move while taking the shots, dont lean backwards or forwards, you are trying to replicate the functionality of a tripod designed specifically for shooting panorama’s, this means you are trying to keep all aspects of the camera the same as you move from shot to shot and you are trying to rotate the camera around its focal plane, instead of around your body.
11. When you’re finished, shoot a shot of clear sky, this will be useful later for signifying the end of this panorama.
12. If you have any doubt at all, shoot the whole thing again and once again finish with the plain skyshot.
13. Back at the pc, ideally use a dedicated program, I use Autopanopro, you can use photoshop or your own favorite program. Process as you would normally and hopefully enjoy your great results!

Here’s my result from today and you can see another result here Here