Bracketed panoramic help

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KernowChris

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Chris
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Took a trip to the moors at the weekend with camera in hand and amongst the shots I took I had a go at doing a bracketed panoramic with my Nikon D3300, which doesn't have an auto-bracketing feature, and using the kit 18/35 lens. I felt the shots I wanted, what with the position and brightness of the sun would benefit from bracketing to avoid too much shadow/lost detail.

This is the process I used, I've no idea if it is right/wrong or could be improved...

Firstly, I wasn't sure what to do about 'focusing', so used the AF to focus mid-frame (infinity) then switched to MF so that the focal plane (?) would stay constant as I panned the camera. I left the aperture at f11 and ISO at 100 and took three shots in each of the three 'panned' positions. I used the 'exposure' meter to set the shutter speed to get a 'normal' exposure and then 1-stop over and under. As I panned away from the sun, the shutter speeds changed in order to get the 'normal' exposure - as expected.

When I came to merge/join it all together, I wasn't sure whether I should merge each bracketed set first and then 'stitch' them or the other way around. I opted to stitch them first and then merge them - right way or not?

At this stage I ended up with this (IT HAS GLARING ISSUES - excuse the pun) and it probably should just be binned, but as a learning experience I wanted to see what I could make of it...



Ignoring the glare on the left, the shading/coloration of the sky is all haywire. The original images show this too and I guess it's to be expected or could I have done anything at the time of capturing the shots to reduce this effect? I applied a graduated filter from the right which seems to have toned it down.

The sun glare, it didn't seem too bad on the back of the camera at the time and I couldn't reposition myself much to have made much difference whilst keeping the pile of rocks in-frame. A different time of day would have avoided this, so I guess that's the real answer here. Since that is unlikely to happen anytime soon, I've tried some PP. I first tried to 'blend' it out, but I wasn't happy with the results. Cropping that side of the image left too little of the rocks so I had a very quick and rough go at moving the rocks themselves and then cropping that side and I think with a bit more care that could work. It would also help with the halo'ing along the edge of the top rock. lens flare artifacts and people (arghh!!) can easily be pp'd out.

Finally, what you probably won't be able to tell for sure from these images is that nothing really seems to be as sharply focused as I would have liked. This seems to be a recurring theme in my 'big landscape' photos :(

And so, this is the rough edit of where I'm up to with it, the one big thing I'm still not happy with is the sky on the left....




Any tips or ideas on how I could have captured the image better/sharper etc or on the PP side greatly appreciated.

Chris

(In hindsight, I'm not really sure if I needed to bother with the bracketing. The 'left' end was the worst leaving the pile of rocks almost silhouetted. I could probably have just 'pulled' out the shadows on them, and shot it slightly underexposed but then I think when stitched the exposure differences would mess up the sky)
 
For focusing there's 3 approaches.
- Hyperfocal distance. You have a depth of field which covers a range of distances. If you focus at infinity on the lens, part of this is wasted on focusing beyond infinity. There are smartphone apps that allow you to calculate this.
- Focus bracketing. You can take separate images focusing on the foreground, midground, and distance - then blend these images automagically in photoshop to give a sharp image through the field of view.
- Or select a focal point and accept everything else will be slightly out of focus.

Shooting: I reckon the best approach would be manual exposure, and quickly adjust shutter speed to take shots in same position, then pan tripod and repeat. The number of clicks adjusting shutter speed one stop is either 2 or 3 depending on whether your camera uses half or third stops. If not bracketing expose to the right using the histogram, plenty of resources on the web to explain why and how. It's often easy to forget a shot with a dark foreground, and correctly exposed dramatic sky, can work better sometimes.

You have a bit of a curved horizon so your tripod might not have been leveled?!

Post processing: I reckon the best approach would be to merge bracketed images first, then merge to panoramic. The sky looks a different colour on the left so may have benefited from setting the white balance manually in post processing for all shots to the same value. You have a relatively bland sky so you could just take it to photoshop and clone the sky to make the left match the right.

More generally: I'm not sure a panoramic shot adds much to an image of this view. To me knowing this is probably a straight wall curved by a panoramic merge is somewhat distracting. It might have been better to frame a single shot with some foreground interest than try get everything into a shot. Those stacked rocks on the left look like they could have worked well.
 
I would set the exposure in manual and leave it the same for all shots and have the same post processing settings for all pictures. The sky naturally changes both brightness and colour as you pan and the panorama should reflect this to look at all natural. Likewise with focus - if you change focus between shots, there will be problems at the point the images are stitched together.
 
Thanks for the replies, I think you have both picked up on the same things that were going thru my mind.
 
Did it need to be bracketed? I wonder if just shooting in RAW would've given you the dynamic range you wanted.

As Alan mentioned, looks like AWB skewed the left-hand image, again RAW would've helped that
 
Using an ND Grad would help reduce the need for bracketing. I personally don't use them though and I have to admit it makes post processing much harder (especially with a slow laptop) Manual everything is usually the best approach when it comes to panos though, there is no alteration of anything from shot to shot which makes for a much smoother blend/stitch all round.
 
Carl Bullock said:
Manual everything is usually the best approach when it comes to panos though, there is no alteration of anything from shot to shot which makes for a much smoother blend/stitch all round.
Click to expand...
That's certainly my mantra.
  • Manual exposure: same exposure(s) for each frame. If one part of the view is brighter than another, then use bracketing to manage it, but use the same set of exposures for each frame and let the software sort it out.
  • Manual focus, obviously.
  • Manual white balance - or preferably shoot raw, which can give you a bit of help with the exposures too.
 
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