For Panoramic Pictures, this camera does not have a Panorama Stitch Mode which helps you align the pictures in the screen on the back like very many points should cameras do but you can still do it. And it’s really not very difficult.
There is just one thing you need to remember, the exposure for the entire series of pictures needs to stay consistent. So, how do you know what the exposure should be? First of all, if you’re taking a Panoramic, I’m assuming you’re outdoors. You’re maybe indoors, I know a lot of Real Estate agents like to take Panoramas of rooms when the lens is not wide enough to capture the entire room and that’s fine too, the same rules apply. You don’t want to use the Flash certainly if you’re capturing a landscape because it just won’t do anything and also if you’re indoors because the light will be a little inconsistent so avoid using the flash.
Next thing, set your ISO accordingly. If you’re outdoors and there’s a lot of light, you need to set this to 100 to get the best least grainy image. So, just press the ISO button here with your index finger and move up to 100 and press Set. If you’re indoors, the case maybe different again because you’re not using the flash, you’ll need to increase the ISO so you can hand hold the shot. If you’re with a tripod then go ahead and use 100 ISO because you can have a long shutter speed and it won’t be relevant. Because I’m assuming that you are hand holding this shot and not using a tripod, then you want to make sure that you have a fast shutter speed. Again, we’re outdoors so 100 ISO should be fine.
Next, let’s set the White Balance, press WB, move this over to Day Light and that should be fine for outdoors. Again, if you’re indoors, go with Tungsten or Fluorescent which everyone best suits your lighting situation, press Set.
Now, what you want to do is press the Shutter button halfway in order to meter the light. So, press the Shutter button, you’ll see that my current settings are 1/80 or 1/100 and F5.6 or if this is a landscape, I’m not going to want to use F5.6. I’m going to want to use something much smaller. So, I can move this to F16. And at F16, I’m using a 1/10th of the second shutter speed.
In my case, I don’t have as much light as you will outdoors so, yours will be much faster. What you want to do because as you’re penning these figures can change and you have to keep them consistent. You need to dial this in using the Manual Mode. So now, that I know, I’m using 1/10th of a second at F16 and that will produce a balanced image. I want to change my Mode dial to M for Manual, move my shutter speed. Right now, I’m on 10 seconds. I want to go to 1/10th of a second. Hold down the AV button here and choose F16.
Now, that my shutter speed and aperture are dialed in, I know that with every single picture in the series, those figures will stay consistent and my exposure will be as consistent as possible. So now, I can go ahead and press the Shutter button halfway. You can see that my meter is indicating my picture is properly exposed and then I can just go ahead and take the picture. And I want to be looking through the View Finder.
And if you’re taking a landscape, you can use the Auto Focus but if you’re not taking a landscape, I would recommend using the Manual Focus. Press the Shutter button halfway, the dot in the center will blink red when the camera has found a focus point. Then go ahead and press the Shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture. Once the picture is captured, just move over a little bit and take another picture and then move over again, take another picture and so on. Because you don’t have the helpful overlapping images in your screen like with cameras, you’re going to have to basically guess. And what I would recommend is about 50%. That’s a good rule of thumb.
So, take your picture and remember what was on the left or right side of the image depending on which direction you’re penning. And then move that to the center of the image and then take another picture. You can also do vertical images this way; just pen up or pen down. When you choose the shutter and the aperture settings for the Panorama, you want to make sure that you’re looking at something that is roughly in between the brightest and darkest portions of the image. So, if you’re taking a picture and the sun is setting in one of the shots, you don’t want to point the camera at the sun in order to find out what the right settings will be. And you don’t want to set it as far away from the sun to find out what the settings will be. You want to set it somewhere in the middle and then set it that way so that the sun isn’t too bright and that the shadows aren’t too dark.
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