PANORAMAS

Panoramas are great for showing an extended landscape in a pleasing horizontal frame. Of course you can go one step further and make scrolling immersive panoramas, where the viewer can navigate up and down within the frame for delivery on the web or screen delivery. But here we will just be looking at ‘hand held’ horizontal landscape panoramas. So these were all taken on location, mostly without a tripod and stitched together in Photoshop which is very forgiving.

But, there is an issue associated with creating effective hand held panoramas.
1. When we view a panorama with our eyes, we are rotating around OUR nodal point or centre - that is rotating around our head - via our feet.
But this is NOT the same as your cameras nodal point, which is somewhere half way along the lens.
2. If you have one, use a dedicated VR panorama head, these rotate the camera around its nodal point.
3. But if you do try this with your normal tripod attached to the camera body you will get a distorted panorama which will need a lot of
correcting in Photoshop, because you are still pivoting around YOUR cameras tripod attachment thread.
4. So to achieve a near perfect panorama without a VR head or your tripod, pivot the lens around its nodal point.
To do this, place your thumb under the lens and pivot the lens around your thumb, whilst trying NOT to shift your position or the
horizontal angle of the camera!

It’s not easy, but if you can, you will make it a lot easier for Photoshop to stitch a good panorama together.