Church Panorama

A few months ago I posted some photos showing the huge tree in front of our local church being removed.    The story behind the reason for the removal is in that thread as well.

In the mean time, work has been completed on the courtyard where the tree stood. The Cross in the courtyard is made from 2 large pieces of the tree's trunk. So the tree lives on, so to speak.

I took 8 photos to stitch together this panorama as described below.

For anyone interested in shooting panoramas, this is the process I normally follow (when I have plenty of time to set up) from shooting to post production.

1. Mount camera in portrait orientation onto my tripod and ensure the camera is level. Portrait orientation will create a higher resolution final image which is especially useful for printing, which I do a lot of.

2. Set focus (I use Back Button Focus)

3. Do a couple of test pans to ensure I have the coverage I want in the panorama.

4. With the camera in manual mode, set the exposure settings with a couple of test shots. A must-do when shooting photos for a panorama is to use the the same exposure for each photo.

5. Put the camera in Live-view mode. On a Canon camera, this also locks up the mirror which removes a possible source of camera movement when the shutter is released, even on a tripod.

6. Take the photos with approximately 50% overlap between successive photos. To release the shutter I use my remote cable shutter release. You can use your own preferred remote shutter release option or the shutter timer on your camera.

7. Copy the raw files onto my computer and open in Adobe Camera Raw.

8. Apply any tonal/colour/white balance and/or other adjustments as required. Another must-do here is to apply any adjustments to ALL the images. In ACR I just preselect all the images before applying adjustments.

9. Open the raw files in PSE.

10. I then ensure all the images are level (horizontally and vertically) relative to each other. If the photos were taken hand-held, it is more likely they will need leveling/straightening before stitching.

11. Stitch the photos together in PSE using both the Cylindrical and Spherical options and evaluate which looks best.

12. After choosing the preferred stitched output, if necessary I apply any localised edits to suit and the very last step is to sharpen the panorama.

13. Print the panorama if desired or required.

Hope this helps someone

ps.....the enlargement of the above image is clearer.