Tripod Techniques: Sweeping the World

Shooting and weaving a panorama to perfection is quite an easy task—all you need is a great subject.

Beautiful, breathtaking landscapes, or even cityscapes, can be captured and developed quite easily. You can take them back home and cherish the memories when you review them, all you need to do is keep a few things in mind.

Sunrise or even sunset gently rolling across the expanse of a city can be a great subject for panoramas. You just need a good vantage point. Exposure: Details Not Available Photograph/Vijay Ramaswamy

Orienting the Camera Correctly
The most common mistake that people make is to shoot horizontally. Set your camera in the portrait orientation on the tripod, and when planning consecutive photos, remember to overlap them by about 30% at least. Use a tripod so that you don’t need to worry about ensuring that all your frames have a seamless horizon.

You can even make panoramas of long exposures along water bodies like the sea or the river. Just ensure that the length of each exposure is the same. Exposure: 8sec at f/22 (ISO 50) Photograph/Jaydeep Patil

The Exposure Consideration
Set the exposure, White Balance and focus manually. You do not want to end up with focusing errors or frames with two radically different kinds of WB settings.While the ideal focal length would be normal to telephoto, shooting with wide angle or even fisheye lenses can give you extremely strange results. But you will also have to cope with all the distortion.

The beautiful vista of the sun shining down the expanse of hills on an early morning could have only been summarised in a panorama. Exposure: 1/60sec at f/9 (ISO400) Photograph/Balaji Durai

Using Panoramic Tripod Heads
A panoramic tripod head helps you maintain a consistent horizon and allows the camera to be positioned so that it rotates around its nodal point between shots. You can set the degree of camera rotation in relation to the focal length that you are using. Some of them even come with a bracket for mounting the camera that allows you to shift orientation from horizontal to vertical within seconds.

Quick Tip
When using a fisheye lens or an extreme wide angle lens for panoramas, remember to position the camera such that the tripod’s legs are not visible in the resulting frames.

For more cool tips on tripods, click here.

This article originally appeared in the March 2014 issue of Better Photography.