My largest panorama ever

Good work and impressive scene!

Wow, I like!!! But for the ignorant among us... yet eager to learn ... how did you do it exactly? When you say stitch together, was it separate photos that you had to take? Sorry if I don't seem to have a clue ( but I don't :))

Thanks a lot!
I have been on a business trip this week, there was no access to the internet at my customer's site. My apologies for the late reply...
There are different ways to do it, probably the best way is to use a tripod and a special tripod head for panoramic shots. I even found a how-to to build your own panoramic head for 10$ on worth1000.com.
I usually do not carry a tripod around so my way is use freehand shots:
- look for a scene without too many foreground objects, moving objects etc. that avoids strange effects like ghost objects etc.
- set camera to Aperture priority mode and try to find out what the fastest shutter speed is (half-press shutter at different positions and look at the meter readings)
- set camera to manual exposure mode and enter the combination of shutter speed and aperture
- manual focus, no zooming between frames of course!
- no polarizer, otherwise you will end up with a very strange sky
- if you hold the camera in portrait orientation, you will end up with more vertical pixels, so the final panorama will be higher compared to landscape orientation, but you need more shots. As the horizon will not be at the same position in all frames,it is easier to crop if the frames are portrait oriented.
- I guess most people shoot from left to right., so do I. My experience is that it's better to point the body towards the right end of the scene. Then I rotate my body to the left and rotate right with every shot. This reduces the tension in your body instead of increasing it.
- I try to overlap the frames by 10 to 20 percent, that makes stitching easier
- I am using Hugin for stitching, it is quite easy to use (there is an assistant - load images - adjust frames - generate image) and the results look good to me. And it's free...
- I use GIMP for post processing

I just want to add a tip: if you overlap more, stitching becomes often much easier. Esp. lens distortion isn't too important and if you have problems with items in the front (changing perspective), it's easier to manage.

For this I overlap by more than 50% usually. So you do not only have shared points each following picture but to the next one and sometimes one after as well. With a digital cam number of images is almost no problem. For orientation I use the AF points of my cam. This way it's easy to keep the horizon (almost) straight without a special tripod head and to get an even distribution of pictures.

And one another thing: depending on the scene it might be sensible to fix the white balance setting. Else the colours might change over the pano...

Full ack... and thanks for the hints, it's always good to get constructive feedback!

I haven't tried 50% overlay or even more, distortion is probably a good reason to give it a try.

I don't own a DSLR, so I use my EVF and turn on the grid, this usually helps a bit. In manual focus mode, the AF indicator becomes a circle and this is not helpful at all.

Manual white balance is a good point, although I did not have any issues with it before. You can also use RAW mode to get around white balance issues. I usally don't do it because it takes about 7 seconds to store the file, that's too much for a longer sequence of photos.

Manual WB isn't very important often as it changes very little usually each frame. It's just something to keep in mind...

Actually pano's are almost the only occasion when I turn on RAW+JPEG, because I do not want to have to convert all the images necessarily. But I could... ;)

no need to apologize, thanks so much for taking the time to explain :-D

Very interesting to read how to do it ... and impressive work I must say! Now I'm even more impressed over your panorama, knowing the work behind it. Thanks again, enjoyed reading about the process a lot, perhaps I'll give it a try when the rain has stopped ;)

But you don't have to get soaking wet by the rain...
Simply open the window, take some telephoto shots of the building at the other side of the street and start stitching...
And you can even do "vertical panoramas" :-)

you're right, I think I've got obsessed by the limitations of rain :-D

though my neighbours might find me a bit strange hanging out of my window pointing a tele lens at their house, I'll give it a try... fun to try new things .. !!!

thanks again, I read Carsten's post too and I'm still learning new stuff :)

I am in the panorama business lately and very glad to find your site. Somehow, I have always been overwhelmed by the extend of what I wanted to take and never thought to take it vertically. Make a lots of sense. Thank you for the other tips too (body position, etc...) and for Carsten tips also.

It's a pity not to see this picture bigger. Do you have this in print in bigger format?

No, I rarely print my photos. I don't like the common small print formats, and we don't have room for large prints in our house.
A photobook is probably a good idea, I just started selecting and editing some photos from Canada for this purpose.

This is the panorama we finally made...

out of 4 pics for you Dieter. I am not sure I can remember the whole path.

Excellent panorama with super reflections!