Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

6.1. Stage 1

6.1.1. Taking the pictures

I started by scouting the best location for my camera, deciding on the focal length, and choosing the hour when the light would be at its most magical. I settled on 20 minutes before total darkness in late March, right after the streetlights came on. I set up my tripod, adjusted the panoramic head so the horizontal rotation axis was level, clamped the camera on, set it in portrait mode, and framed the scene.

To take the photos, I tilted the camera about 20° upward. I left plenty of empty space above the building in the center of my scene, knowing that when Stitcher straightened the perspectives, it would chop the tops off the low-angle pictures in the center of the series. I set the focal length at 19mm to completely fill the 24 × 36mm frame.

I made sure that the ball head was set so the camera would rotate around the lens entry point. Using the click stops on the pan head's rotation ring, I overlapped the pictures by about 20%.

Settings for the shots: Exposure: 3 seconds at f-9.0, ISO 100 White balance: tungsten Format: RAW with simultaneous small JPEGs

I then measured the light with a 1° spot meter. As often occurs in night photography, parts of the building facades were overexposed. In order to have a choice of material to work with, you can take one "normal" shot and a second one underexposed by about two f-stops. Later, you can put them on separate layers in Photoshop and use a layer mask to integrate the shot with the highlights with ...