Pan problem solving hand held

[Terrywoodenpic]

Churchill playing field Uppermill..
I wanted to get a pan of the playing field with Dogs playing in the river Tame. And after a couple of obviously failed attempts I decided to take it in two sections. Three portrait shots of the main field followed, some time later, by a few more of people and dogs, in and by the river.
However I failed to get the height quite right, and the two levels missed by quite a bit and were well out of line. Never the less I was able to fill the missing areas bottom left and top right with a little Distortion and warping of the image in photoshop, which usually give a more convincing result than cloning and filling. And I did not want to crop the top of the trees on the left.

I will try again on another day and include a bit more of the river. but at least I got the time 9.57am, and the light about right. Though a few puffy clouds would have been nice.

 

[Harlequin565]

One tip I heard (but never tried) was to tie a bit of string to the bottom of your camera and stand on the other end. This stops (or at least restricts) vertical movement if you keep the string taut. A nice image nonetheless.

 

[Terrywoodenpic]

One tip I heard (but never tried) was to tie a bit of string to the bottom of your camera and stand on the other end. This stops (or at least restricts) vertical movement if you keep the string taut. A nice image nonetheless.

I managed to fix the height of the camera ok with my walking pole However I was pointing the camera down a degree or two for the final shots.
I was stitching with PTAssembler so it coped very well.

When doing difficult hand held pans, it is best to stitch images adding one at a time, and adding control points and optimising individually as you do so.
This was necessary for this pan as my yaw, pitch and roll, were all over the place. Which is unusual for me, as I have done hundreds of them, but not since Covid, so I am out of practice. But that way I ended up with a perfect stitch.
PTGui or Hugin could have done it just as well. PTGui makes masking very easy, which is useful for pans with people moving about, but it is very expensive especially the Pro version, which has all the more useful features.