Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

2.2. Stage 2

2.2.1. What exposure?

With most assembly programs you have to shoot all the pictures in a series at the same settings, with identical exposure, focus, and white balance. With ImageAssembler you can correct the exposure slightly—by about a third of a stop—between consecutive shots without it being apparent. This was very useful here, given the strong light level differences between the rooms. The two left-hand photos required a slightly longer exposure than the ones on the right (where there was more light), so I gave them a few extra seconds.

12s/f-11

10s/f-11

8s/f-11

8s/f-11

8s/f-11

You must set white balance manually so consecutive images will have the same color balance. The restaurant's two dining rooms were getting light from three different sources, so using automatic white balance mode would have been a disaster. I like my interior pictures a bit warm, so I always choose a color temperature slightly above the ambient one—in this case 3600 K.

My final task was to photograph the table in the right foreground, whose center was slightly over-exposed by the lamps. In a photo, a large over-exposed area looks wrong, but it's good to retain a few hot spots; they give the picture energy. So my plan was just to shrink the area of over-exposure a little. I shot the table area twice, at very different exposures, without moving the camera. I first shot it normally, then under-exposed it by a stop and a half. (Beyond three f-stops the subterfuge becomes too obvious.)