LEVEL YOUR TRIPOD

For the best results you should always shoot panorama images using a monopod or tripod, but you also need to make sure that the camera is perfectly level for each exposure. By doing this, you’ll reduce the amount of cropping that’s required during editing, which ultimately gives you more room for cropping without losing edge detail.

Shooting with your camera mounted on a tripod is only half the battle – to ensure that your frames are level you must make sure that the top of the tripod, where the centre column is inserted, is level. Most tripods have a spirit level in this area that you can use to level off the legs, which may need to be adjusted individually. Once the tripod is level, even if the camera is pointing up or down slightly, your shots will be level as long as the horizon is straight in the frame.

Any technique that requires multiple exposures to be shot can seem like an unnecessary faff, but all the techniques are incredibly easy to apply, and always produce the desired result of increasing detail in some way. Capturing HDR panoramas adds a level of complexity to the shooting stage, but by using automatic exposure bracketing you can shoot an HDR pano almost identically to a regular pano – you just have to wait for the three or more exposures to fire off before rotating the tripod head.

When it comes to editing,

Lightroom provides the ability to produce HDR panos in a single dialog but this isn’t recommended. When using the HDR Panorama Photo Merge option, deghosting isn’t applied to the HDR images, which can often result in the ghosting of moving subjects, so it’s always best to process the

HDR images first and then merge the resulting images into the pano, which is exactly what we’ll do here.