To set up your camera for Panorama is pretty easy. This is camera does not have a panoramic mode, so you can very easily set it to that and just go ahead and take a series of pictures.
Basically, what the panoramic mode would do is help you align the images in the back just not that big of a deal, and then also more importantly. Lacks the exposure of the first picture you take in the series, so all you need to do is lack the exposure for the entire series, and doing so is very simple. All you want to do first of all stick to the program mode make sure your mode dialer is set to P make sure your ISO is not set to automatic, so choose an ISO press the ISO button up here. I’m going to choose 100 because I’m assuming we’re outdoors. There’s should be plenty of light and doesn’t need the camera to be anymore sensitive to light than 100 press set.
I don’t need to do so now, but eventually I will have to set the white balance as well, so I’ll go ahead and do that. Press the WB button and chose daylight if your outdoors. If it’s a cloudy day, you can choose cloudy or even shade these two options or help warm up the tones in the image a little bit. I’m going to stick to daylight for the most natural colors, press set.
Now with my ISO and the white balance properly set. Now I need to point the camera at something that is not the brightest and not the darkest image of the series of images in my Panoramic. So for example, if the sun is in one of the pictures in your Panoramic depending across the landscape and the sun happens to be in one of the shots. You don’t want to look at the sun in order to judge the right exposure for the entire scene because then picture farthest from the sun will be much too dark. You also don’t want to point at the darkest image in the scene because then as you work your way to sun. The sun picture will be much too bright. So you want to look at something in the center press the shutter button halfway. Your shutter speed and aperture are displayed down here at the bottom. Remember these because we’re going to have to dial those in using the manual mode.
Now turn your mode dial to M stands for manual and this will me set both the shutter speed and the aperture. The camera won’t have any say whatsoever, so I’m going to use my dial right up here in the front, change my shutter speed to 200 of a second, and then I’ll press the dial in like a button, choose the aperture setting and I’ll go down to choose 6.3. Now I can change this if I want a narrower aperture I can choose 8.0 and then change my shutter speed to 125 this will allow me to get a little bit more of the landscape in focus. I’ll press the shutter halfway just to see that my light meter is not over or underexposed, and it seems to be just fine. So now I know I’m set in that respect. ISO is set properly. My white balance is set properly and my shutter speed and aperture are all set properly,
Now you may want to set the manual focus as well. This will lock the focus throughout the entire series, and that too can be very, very important. I’d hide it where the focus on one picture is different than a focus on another picture, so to be on the safe side go ahead and manually focus. A simple way of doing this is by pressing the shutter button halfway to lock on your target once that focus is locked turn the focus dial to MF. Let me show you what that looks like. Press the shutter button, wait for the double beep in the screen you’ll see the green brackets and the green dot on the top corner, and then turn the focus dial to MF.
Now it’s locked at the same distance at which the auto focus was locked up. If you want to double check you can just turn the focus ring when you do so the image in the back will be zoom in. You can choose the zoom in even more using the dial up in the front again, we’re going to zoom in a little bit more and then continue turning the focus ring until we have focus on our subject. Now I can just press set to go back to the main picture.
Now everything is completely locked including my focus, my shutter speed and aperture setting, my white balance which is very important as well as the ISO. Now all I have to do is align the pictures properly. The way you do that is take your first picture and notice what is on the left hand side or right hand side of the screen, and then place that at the center of the screen. Basically, what that does is overlap 50% of the picture. What you want is an overlap of about 30 to 50% anything less than 30% and you risk not having the pictures stitch properly in the software on your computer.
Once you’ve taken the entire series of pictures you can take just about as many as you’d like. You’ll bring the pictures into your computer, and use a software application such as Photoshop to stitch the pictures together.
Finally, a tip to maximize the resolution of your Panorama is to simply turn the camera on its side. If you shoot on this direction you maximize the vertical resolution.
To find out much more about digital photography and your digital camera, go to LBGuides.com
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