I’m doing an interesting project – shoot 360 degree panoramas in the desert during sunrise and sunset. And I’ve learned a lot about panos that you don’t readily find when you research this subject.
Let’s start with the fundamentals. There are basically two kinds of panos – horizontal and vertical. Horizontal is when you take successive overlapping images from left to right or vise versa. Vertical is when the direction is from top to bottom (or vise versa). Of course you can combine the two. For a 360 degree panorama we’ll focus on the horizontal.
The first step is to take care when setting up your tripod to make sure the plate where you mount your camera is perfectly flat. This is a well known step but can’t be emphasized enough. It’s worth spending five minutes turning your ball head in all directions to make sure it’s perfectly flat. If you don’t your resulting panorama image will look like a kids’ roller coaster with the up and down effect. If you have a tripod with a leveling center post you’re way ahead of the game.
You can also use a pano camera mount but that’s not entirely necessary if the nearest object is some distance from the camera (say 100 feet or so). The closer the foreground objects, the more you need a pano camera mount. Let’s not get into the specifics at this point.
With your camera mounted on your perfectly leveled tripod you’re now ready to configure it. There are a couple of settings you will want.
First, turn off auto exposure. Determine your exposure manually. But how do you set your exposure, especially during sunrise or sunset? The answer may be just a bit out of the box. If you set your exposure pointing directly into the sun the rest of the landscape will be greatly underexposed. If you set your exposure looking away from the sun you could end up with a greatly overexposed image. One good compromise is to take your exposure 90 degrees from the sun. There’s nothing you can do about the highlight clipping you’ll get when your camera is pointed directly at the sun so don’t sweat it.
Second, turn off auto white balance, that is, if you’re shooting a digital camera. This is something that can easily be overlooked but it’s important because just before the sun comes up you’ll likely have a very bright warm sky in the east with a very cool sky directly opposite in the west as the earth shadow descends towards the horizon. So turn off auto white balance. What should you set it on? Daylight is find and probably the most logical choice.
Third, turn off auto focus. Do that manually as well. This is pretty standard stuff. Focus so that your depth of field holds the focus on the foreground and background.
As for how you mount your camera, mount it in the portrait orientation so that you get a larger up-down dimension.
As for focal length, don’t use anything wider than 50 mm (or it’s equivalent) on a 35mm DSLR. Even a mild wide angle of 35mm will give you pincushioning and why make this whole process any harder on yourself.
By my tests, shooting in portrait orientation at 55 mm requires 24 shots at 15 degree intervals to cover the full 360. I took 25 just to be safe. This gives the 1/3rd overlap you want between images.
Take off your lens hood. “Why,” you protest. “You’ll get lens flare.” Yes you will. You can’t avoid it. What you want to be sure of is that as you’re panning through the sun that you don’t get to a point where your lens hood cuts in and abruptly the lens flare goes away. You will get a vertical line in your stitched image that has a sharp transition from flared to un-flared. You want the effect to be smooth and natural. I know, it goes against all our instincts and better judgement but trust me, take it off.
Also, don’t use a polarizing filter. The effect it has on the sky will vary greatly as you move toward or away from the sun and you will end up with a very unnatural result. You may need to avoid graduated neutral density filters as well if your horizon is not, well, horizontal.
Where do you start your panorama? In other words, do you start pointing at the sun, pointing away from it or somewhere in between? Or does it even matter? Well, when the sun is well above or well below the horizon it really doesn’t matter much. But while the sun is just below or just above the horizon it matters a great deal. Here’s the problem. At certain times during sunrise and sunset the light intensity is changing very fast and by the time it takes to make a complete 360 the light can be one or two stops darker or lighter by the time you get back to your starting point. Probably the best starting point during this rapid change period is directly away from the sun. However, then the light isn’t changing so quickly the best place to start is 90 degrees to the sun.
Well, that’s about it – some well known principles and techniques and some learned the hard way. Go out and give it a try. It’s really a lot of fun. And hey, you may end up with some cool wall paper for a room in your house or apartment.
Oh, and one other thing (but this one is surely personal preference). It’s nice to have a high vantage point for a full 360 degree panorama in the desert. A nice high rock is perfect. Just don’t fall off.
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