Wide field & panoramic photography

[John54]

This post describes in brief how to create panoramic & wide field photos with a standard digital camera.

African landscapes and nature are of a stunning beauty. Many visitors will capture these places and moments on photos, as lasting memories of their experiences.
But sometimes it is just not possible to take the picture you would want: A vast landscape, a herd of buffalo, a complete picture of the lodge or campsite. Picturing these occasions with justice would often require a special wide angle or fisheye lens to capture the whole scene. Most people use common compact digital cameras and not expensive system cameras with interchangeable lenses.

Thanks to software it is possible to capture such images in high quality with most ordinary cameras, in my case a seven year old Nikon 8800, an 8 megapixel compact camera. The simple trick is to take a series of overlapping photos, and stitch them together using photographic software. This may seem like a lot of difficult work, but in fact it is fast & easy.

First, grab your camera and check out the "scene" menu. If this has an option "panorama", your good. If not, you have to figure out how to make a series of photos with fixed settings for exposure, aperture, white balance and such on your camera. The "panorama" option makes these settings automatically, guides you with the overlap and stores the series in a separate map on your photo card. A convenient extra, but not required.

Next, capture the scene in a series of overlapping photos from one point of view. The sequence, portrait or landscape mode, up and down or even diagonal, it does not matter. Just make sure to cover the whole scene with an overlap of at least 20-30%. A tripod might be useful here to better preserve the viewpoint if you also want to include nearby foreground objects.

Now you will need a photographic stitching program. There are several available, but I always use Microsoft ICE. It is free and simple to use. Just drop your photo series in the program and it will automatically sort out how the photos must be stitched together. You can adjust perspective, projection and orientation to get the best results.

Your awards will be photos in very high resolution and with wide fields of view. Try it!
Here is the download site for the free Microsoft ICE program: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/ ... s/ivm/ICE/
Attached some sample photos, made at the Omaha farm in Namibia.

Regards, John