In this issue:

This issue is a few days late as I took the opportunity to go away for a few days. But now that I'm back, here it is!

Panoramic Landscapes

I love panoramas. There's something very appealing about their shape. Maybe we see the world more in these dimensions than the near square format of standard film/sensor frames. It might also explain the upsurge in the popularity of widescreen TVs!

Panoramas have a reputation of being hard to take. There are dedicated panorama cameras available from the (relatively cheap!) Noblex Fixed Focus Rotating Lens Panoramic Camera which uses 35mm film to the ultra-expensive Linhof Technorama 617s III, Medium Format Panoramic Camera Kit with 72mm Lens & Finder, but unless you've got at least a thousand dollars to spare, you probably can't afford one! But you can take panoramas with any kind of camera.

All a panorama is, is a sequence of images where you turn slightly for each different frame. In the old days, before PCs and the likes of Photoshop were around, you'd take your prints (there wasn't much point in shooting panoramas on slide film, for obvious reasons), lay them out on a table and position them over each other where they overlapped. A bit of sticky tape held them together. As a side note, this technique was used by NASA to build up mosaic pictures of the planets and satellites their spaceprobes visited, up till the late '70s/early 80s when computers were introduced to make the process less laborious.

Now that PCs and image manipulation packages are easy to come by, high-quality panoramas can now be created by anyone. If you're shooting slide or negative film, you will need to have your images scanned before you do anything else.

The idea behind taking panoramas with SLR cameras is that the camera is rotated around its nodal point during each successive exposure. What's the Nodal Point? It's the point inside your camera where the light rays converge and flip over. It's different for different focal lengths (on zoom lenses) and for different prime lenses (fixed focal length lenses like a standard 50mm lens). It's important to rotate about this point to eliminate image mismatches due to changes in parallax. Parallax is the apparent shift of an object against a background due to a change in observer position.

Just to be clear, the Nodal Point is not the same as the film/sensor plane. Generally, for most SLR cameras and lenses, the Nodal Point is located somewhere towards the center of the lens barrel and lies in front of the image/sensor plane.

Parallax is easily demonstrated by a simple experiment. Hold up your finger about 1 foot in front of your face and alternately open and close your left and right eyes. You'll notice that the background shifts left and right with respect to your finger depending on which eye is open. Try another experiment: With your finger still raised, close one eye and turn your head from side to side. Notice how your finger moves with respect to the background. This relative movement is due to the fact that you’re not rotating your head around your eye’s nodal point, which is somewhere in the center of your eyeball. Instead, you’re rotating about your spine which is several inches to the rear and off to one side. It is this relative side-to-side motion that we try to eliminate when setting up a camera for panoramas. [If you want to read up more about parallax, Wikipedia have a good explanatory article.]

Now, if you consider a camera held up to your face - it will suffer even greater parallax errors as it's farther from your spine (the point of rotation of your head) than your eye. It's surprisingly common for people to take panoramas in this fashion and then find the individual pictures don't match up.

So use a tripod and rotate the camera on the tripod. The parallax errors will be significantly smaller but there will still be some error involved. However, the images will match up better than with the head rotation method.

What perfectionists strive for is to have the camera rotate about the nodal point. There are brackets and contraptions available that will let you offset your camera from the tripod's axis of rotation and with a little experimentation and trial and error, you can position your camera so that its nodal point is directly over the axis of rotation of the bracket. Getting this spot-on means your images should line up perfectly.

A few months ago I bought such a bracket - the Kaidan Kiwi. This comes in two halves which produce an L-shaped bracket. Its instruction manual explains how to set it up and find the nodal point for your camera and lens. However, you have to get your tripod perfectly level before using it, otherwise you end up with a curved panorama rather than a straight one.

I've had good success using this bracket, but it is large and heavy and certainly a bit too cumbersome to be carrying on long walks or while away on vacation.

Then I recently came across a free bit of software called AutoStitch. Written by a couple of students at the University of Columbia, this takes all of the heartache out of creating panoramas. All you do is select the size of the final image and tell it what images you want it to stitch. It then goes off and produces your panorama.

It really is that simple. Unless successive images are radically different in exposure (i.e. one image to too light or dark compared to another), it seamlessly blends them. It performs all the warping of the images necessary to get them to align (other software I've used can cause ghosting in the overlap areas where it hasn't quite aligned the images). It also aligns multiple rows of images rather than just a single strip.

Even better, it doesn't require you to set up your camera to rotate about its nodal point. When I was in Crete last year, I tried shooting a few panoramas with my Canon EOS 300D held up to my eye (I didn't have a tripod with me) [you can still get this camera from Amazon for the reduced price of $749]. When I got home, I tried stitching the pictures together using various bits of software (including software dedicated to stitching images together) and didn't get satisfactory results. I knew, though, that it was because I'd swivelled the camera about my spine. But I tried these images with AutoStitch and they came out perfectly. See for yourself here.

I went walking up the Wicklow mountains in Ireland last weekend and up to a high point called Djouce which offers a view over the rolling hills south of Dublin. As an experiment, I shot 8 frames while rotating my head about the scene (camera to eye as per normal). I wanted to see if the Crete photos were a fluke as the panoramas from there were composed of, at most, 3 frames each (sometimes 2).

What can I say? I plugged 8 frames into AutoStitch and after a bit of time processing the images, it produced a perfect panorama with no ghosting I could see in the overlap reasons. I like software like that. It may only do one thing but it does that one thing very well.

Give AutoStitch a try. It's free and, so far, it produces the best panoramic results of all the panorama/stitching software I've tried.

One thing to remember when taking panoramas is that the exposures of each frame should be the same. So if you make your first exposure at f/8 and 1/125 of a second, take them all using those settings. Yes, you will have to put your camera into manual mode. Otherwise, you run the risk of having radically different exposures for your images. For example, if you're panning over a landscape that contains water, like a lake, any sunlight reflected off the water may make your camera take a shorter exposure than for the other frames in your sequence. Setting your camera to manual mode will prevent that.

Why not take up the Panorama Challenge and if you have any success with creating your own panoramas, send them in to me and I'll put them up on the website. It will also spur others on to give panoramas a try!

Reader Questions:

I received the following questions from readers recently:

Q: What's the difference between a CompactFlash (CF) Card and a Microdrive? And with CF cards, do the stated speeds of 40x, 80x, etc. work with all cameras?

A: Microdrives are miniature hard drives whereas CF cards are solid-state microchips (flash memory). Microdrives use the thicker Type II CompactFlash format, so they fit in the same sized housing and have all the same connections as CF cards. Their moving parts require more power than flash memory and they're more fragile than CF cards. As long as your camera has a CF Type II slot, you can use Microdrives, but check your manual to be sure your camera supports them.

The 40x, 60x, etc. speed rating on memory cards is based on the data transfer speed that the card will support. The 1x figure of 150Kb per sec comes from the transfer speeds quoted on CD drives, so a 40x card is 40 times faster than this (with a transfer speed of about 6,000 Kb per sec). It doesn't mean it's 40x faster than a standard card though, as that may already be a 4x or 8x card in the first place.

One factor to consider is how fast your camera itself can transfer data. If you have an entry-level model, there's not much point in using the latest, super-fast card. Match the speed of the card to your camera - slowish cards for compact cameras, medium speeds (up to 40x) for high-end compacts and budget SLRs and fast cards (60x plus) for high-end SLRs.

Q: I do a lot of mountain biking. What kind of camera should I look for to get some decent photos?

A: It's no fun lugging a heavy camera around when your out and about. You should look for a fairly lightweight model. Something with single-handed operation (all the vital functions accessible to one hand) could also be useful for photos on the move. Look for a camera with at least a 3x zoom lens so you can close in on subjects a little distance away. Buy a decent sized memory card as the ones supplied with cameras usually have a puny amount of memory. If you're out and about for several days (nowhere near a PC to download your pictures), get the biggest memory card you can afford or invest in a portable storage device like the FotoChute which will store 20Gb of downloaded images. Compact cameras are now in the 5 Megapixel range, so go look for a camera with 4-5 megapixel resolution for top-notch shots. Also, get a good camera pouch that's belt-mounted and sits on your hip when riding. Anything around your neck will just swing about and annoy you. If you want to stray into SLR territory, the Canon EOS 300D is very light as SLRs go (it's made of plastic rather than metal) and offers 6 megapixel resolution.

Q: Will I be able to get the same standard of prints from digital images as I get from film on a home printer?

A: Absolutely. With today's photo-quality inkjet printers, you'll get superb results. Seasoned pros can no longer tell the difference between inkjet prints and traditional darkroom prints and top-notch printers from companies like Epson and Canon are only a few hundred dollars for A3/13" x 19" sized printers (A4/8.5"x14" printers are cheaper). While the printers themselves are comparatively cheap, the consumables (paper and ink) can prove expensive over time, so make sure you compare ink refill prices for different printers before you buy. Buy.com have a good range of printers and consumables. (Use this coupon to get $10 OFF $150 in their Computer Store! New Customers Only! Exp 06-30-05!)

Q: Have you any advice on shooting better silhouettes?

A: Sometimes, when you shoot silhouettes, there's detail in the part of the picture you want to be completely black. The first thing to do is stick with bold, distinctive subjects that are easily recognizable - people, statues, trees, etc. Once you've found your subject, you need to compose the picture so that it's against a clean background like a bright sky. Get low down with the camera looking up.

The best silhouettes have plenty of contrast between the subject and background which is why bright days give the best results. In a bright backlit situation, most cameras will automatically produce silhouettes. If you want to make sure you get the right result, aim the camera at a bright (but not the brightest) part of the scene and take an exposure reading. Then manually set your camera to those settings (or use the exposure lock) and then take the picture.

If the sun is in your scene, beware of lens flare. You can end up with streaks across the image which decrease contrast. One way of avoiding this is to shield the sun behind something (like a tree or someone's head).

General Photo News

Microsoft has just released their RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer PowerToy for download. This utility allows viewing of Canon (CRW & CR2) RAW and Nikon (NEF) RAW files as well as TIFF images and other standard image formats (BMP, GIF, PNG, JPEG etc.). The utility is split into a Windows XP shell extension which provides preview / edit / print commands for RAW files as well as a RAW viewer application. The bad news: It's a 47Mb download! Get it here.

Nikon has announced an update to its RAW conversion and image management program. As well as adding support for the Nikon D50, Nikon Capture version 4.3 now adds color aberration control, red eye correction and improves processing for NEF files. The new color aberration tool automatically reduces the appearance of color fringing. The multi image window, which displays thumbnails and allows simultaneous editing of multiple images, is now easier to use; names of preferred folders can be changed to something the user finds easier to remember. Get it here.

RawShooter Essentials V1.1.3 was released earlier this month. The changes in this release: Optimized Performance - the creation of proxy files and image transition has been speeded up to give an almost instantaneous response. For example an image being viewed at 100% in the dynamic preview can be instantly changed to the next one in sequence without any visible delay. This greatly enhances the workflow for the user in terms of editing and allows them to easily decide the best image in a sequence; Dual processor support - one of the most commented features of RawShooter Essentials 2005 has been its processing speed for RAW files. Now, utilizing a dual processor, it has become even faster; New Camera support for Nikon D70s and Olympus C7070WZ; Enhanced copy/paste function for image corrections - uses familiar CTRL-C/V to copy/paste a set of image corrections onto one or more similar images; Ability to specify output dpi - this enables the user to convert either a full resolution image or if required, a 72 dpi image for distribution via email. This is particularly useful for TIFF files; Film strip mode for RAW thumbnails with auto scaling to fit in window. Get it here.

Nikon launches low-priced digital SLR: The Nikon D50 is aimed at those moving up from a compact camera to their first digital SLR. This 6.1 megapixel camera comes with an 18-55mm DX zoom lens and uses SD memory cards. A range of scene modes on top of the usual manual and aperture/shutter priority modes are provided along with a new 'child' mode for more accurate skin tones and vivid colors. Price is around $899.

Nikon launches D70 successor: More of a progression than a replacement, the Nikon D70s contains a number of firmware improvements, a slightly bigger LCD screen, a more optimized flash, a new Lithium-ion battery and an optional remote-release cord.

Site Update News

Several new articles have been added to the Photo Articles page; if you've got an article, why not send it in?

The number of Simple Tips has now been increased to sixteen and a new Digital Photography Tips page which can be reached from it. This latter page is updated frequently.

A new page for Nikon Cameras has been added.

A new page detailing photography Travel Tips has been added as has a FAQs page.

I've also added a bit more blurb about me to the About Me page.

The layout of the site is changing in the near future. Take a look at this test page and let me know what you think. You can either contact me via the feedback form or vote using the small voting form at the bottom of the the Great Landscape Photography Homepage.

Well, that's it for this issue. If you've any suggestions for the site, questions that need answering, pictures or articles you'd like to send in or you've come across some software you think we should know about, do let me know.

Likewise, if you have any thoughts about the things you would like to see in future issues, please let me know by using the feedback form to do this.

In the meantime, visit Great Landscape Photography to catch up with the frequent updates and keep your film dry, your digital sensors spotless and your lenses clean!

Warm Regards,
Gary