Following my previous article which was a hands-on review of a Seitz Roundshot VR Drive motorized panoramic head, this essay is more conceptual, and totally hardware independent. I will address panoramic format, immersive viewpoint and panoramic composition, and present various ways of capturing and processing the panoramas. At the end of this essay, I will include a list of basic rules for taking panoramic pictures, but rather than rehashing standard panoramic advice, I will present several atypical situations and approaches that are not covered in other publications.
Panoramic Composition
Panoramic composition is not easy. Compared to conventional 3:2 or 4:3 formats for which you can carefully select the best angle and frame, the panoramic format (3:1 or longer) confronts us often either with dull sections in some parts of the frame which can make the entire picture boring, or with some unavoidable clutter which is even worse. The other problem which we often see, are some gr...
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Les Palenik is an Ontario-based photographer. Totally camera-agnostic, he's been using various models of Canon, Nikon, and Fuji film cameras. Prior to using VR Drive, he used also robotic GigaPan Epic panoramic tripod head. All images in this article including the finished panoramas were processed with a cloudless, non-subscription perpetual copy of Adobe Photoshop CS5. Originally a computer engineer, he's always been attracted to panoramic photography, but by now he has run out of all available wall space. When he is not shooting or stitching pano shots, he is still writing programs, among other things also software for automation of the panoramic image workflow.
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