In an effort to reduce the amount of sites I have to upload my images to (Flickr, Smugmug, PanoPlanets, Photofolly etc) I have centralized on keeping my images on just two websites. Smugmug and Flickr,  and just linking to either one of those sits for my various other web presences.

If you haven’t noticed on the PanoPlanets website, that when you click on an image it will now take you to the Smugmug site from which you can view larger versions of the images, and also order prints directly from Smug mugs printing services.

If you haven’t taken a look recently at my smug mug site then go on over and take a look

Remixing an old planet  with an underwater texture.

I generally make all my PanoPlanets and 360 panoramas using a tripod and a panoramic head. This  set up will always produce excellent  photographs with a consistent overlap. Using the Nodal ninja NN5 with an indexing head makes taking a 360 panorama an effortless task. However this often leaves my photography in two worlds. Bring my tripod and panoramic head and shoot PanoPlanets, or leave them at home and don’t even try to shoot PanoPlanets or any kind of panorama.  Unfortunately this either leaves me packing heavy or missing out on making some excellent PanoPlanets. As you will see from my PanoPlanets they are almost exclusively within San Francisco, (and not far from my car at that).

I recently took a vacation to Aruba on which I did not want to bring my tripod and pano head, hence I thought I would dig into how to get the best from shooting handheld panoramas.

Parallax and Panoramas

Before describing how to shoot panoramas handheld, I think its best to give a brief (non technical) description of Parallax the main culprit  for panorama failures. Parallax is the affect that you can see when you hold your finger in front of your eyes and look through it at a distant object, then alternately close one eye and then the other. Your finger moves in relation to the background. what is really happening is that your eyes are looking at the scene from a different viewpoint and introducing Parallax. The same thing happens if we take a photograph of an  a foreground object that is in front of something else in the distance (say a car nearby parked in front of a building in the distance). If we took one photo then took a step to the right and took a second image, we would see that the car is in front of a different part of the building. This is bad for shootig panoramas as we need to stitch multiple adjacent photos together to make the entire image. If each photo is different due to parallax then the stitching software will have a hard time.

In the diagram above the addition of parallax will make to adjacent images  in a round of panoramas different from each other. This is particularly true when there is an object in the foreground that interacts with a background object.  With a lot of parallax  you may end up with stitching issues.

The photographs below show an example of parallax errors that can lead to stitching problems.

Minimizing Parallax

To minimize the impact of this we want to reduce Parallax as much as possible. Ideally  you can use a tripod fitted with a Panorama head. this will rotate the camera about the no parallax point and as the name suggests result in a round of shots in the Panorama that should not have any noticeable parallax issues. If a panorama head is not available then  mounting the camera to a normal tripod will introduce some consistent parallax. For handholding the technique of turning is very important as our natural tendency is to rotate around our feet. this will cause some significant parallax issues. One way to overcome this would be to make an effort to rotate around the camera and in fact  rotate our feet in a small circle. As shown in the diagram below.

Handheld Friendly Panoramas

In addition to trying to minimize Parallax you can select your subject to make your life easier,  as not all scenes will be handheld friendly. Parallax becomes an issue if there are complex interactions between objects that are close to the camera and objects that are further away. If a scene has little variation in how far the objects are from you, or there are very few foreground objects interacting with your background then the parallax issue will be minimized.

This doesn’t mean to say the image has to be boring as Stone Henge would make a great handheld pano friendly subject.

So try to avoid scenes with a high degree of foreground objects that interact with the background objects. If you do have some key foreground interactions try to shoot them dead central to the photograph so they are not the main stitching areas.

Camera set up

I have written other articles detailing camera set up and there is no change for handholding other than you may want to check your resulting shutter speed  is not too slow for handholding.

• Set to Aperture priority and set the aperture to give good depth of field say 9.0
• Take four readings at 90 degrees apart to get the min and max readings.
• Average the readings and switch to manual mode, dial in the aperture and shutter speed based on the average.
• At this point check the shutter speed isn’t too low for handholding, if it is either increase the ISO or increase the aperture size.
• Take some test images to see that the detail that you’re interested in is coming out (i.e. if the sky is important make sure you’re not blowing it out and if some of the darker areas are important make sure they’re not underexposed)
• Focus on the main subject area of your image and switch to manual focus
• set the white balance to one of the manual  modes.

Shooting the Scene

In the same way as shooting a tripod panorama,  how many shots you need to take depends on the lens you’re using. I have detailed in other articles on how to calculate how many shots should be needed for each lens, however when shooting handheld it is more important to just ensure that there is a good overlap from frame to frame. The best way I have found is to use the markers on the focusing screen to line up features of the scene from left to right.

• Start with the first frame and line up the focusing points with key features of the scene. Scan your eye to the right hand side of the screen and make a note of what features align with the right hand focusing point.
• Take the photograph then moving your feet to rotate as much around the camera lens as possible, line up the features of the scene that were on the right of the viewfinder with the focusing points on the left of the scene.
• Complete the round of photographs until the whole scene has been captured.
• Repeat rounds of panoramas tilted up and tilted down.

In shooting some handheld panoramas, I decided to  invest in a precision gridded  focusing screen. This screen shows a grid which allows  much easier alignment of photographs from shot to shot. The image below shows  the Canon Eg-D focusing screen and how you can use the grid to line up shot to shot.

Check out this article as an instructable

Shooting Hand held Panoramas – More DIY How To Projects

Previous Tutorial PanoPlanet Workflow

Continuing with my handheld PanoPlanets, I made this image on the beach in Aruba.

It was quite dark, so I’m really pleased with clarity of the resulting image.

Not having taken my tripod with me to Aruba, I  thought it was going to be a PanoPlanet free  vacation, however taking my time to make this image handheld turned out to be very rewarding

This is the California Lighthouse  in Aruba, comprised of 30 individual handheld shots.