[Bcrary3]

I'm wanting to to an panoramic image using my K-5. No idea what the subject will be yet, but, I am putting up a display, and I'd like to have a long line of images, (that are separated) What I am basically wanting to do is like the bottom image, where I print them off and stretch them (they'd be printed on canvas) and kinda have a small gap between them. How do I do this with the K-5? Is it possible? Do I need a spesial tripod? Thanks!

[Adam]

You can certain use a K5 for this purpose, though you'll have to merge and or crop the different photos using software. Any stable tripod should do the trick.

[Bcrary3]

Basically, just set the camera up on a tripod, take a shot, move over a bit so the edge of the last frame is in the edge of the next frame and so on? Is that all there is to it, until PP?

[boriscleto]

Basically, just set the camera up on a tripod, take a shot, move over a bit so the edge of the last frame is in the edge of the next frame and so on? Is that all there is to it, until PP?

For your purposes you might need something like this.

FEISOL PB-70 Panning Base PB-70 B&H Photo Video

It would be even better to have something like the Panosaurus to eliminate parallax

The Panosaurus Panoramic Tripod Head Home Page

[halfspin]

No need to worry about parallax unless you have largish foreground items in the image. You don't need to move over just turn your camera on the tripod in the same spot.

[panoguy]

Consider the vertical FOV of the scene you wish to capture, and choose an appropriate focal length to capture that height. The best way to insure you have enough resolution in your file to print them, is to orient your camera vertically (on it's side) and consider that your lens' "horizontal" FOV will capture the height (on a K-5, that's 4920 pixels or about 20 inches at 240 dpi). Like others have said, choose a stable tripod and a good rotation device (and be sure your camera is level), and keep things away from the foreground.

If you want details in the foreground (and depending on the lens, that could mean within 10 feet), then parallax will be a problem. See here for an explanation. In this case, you would need an adjustment rail (sometimes called macro rail, or panoramic nodal adjuster) to move your camera backwards on top of the tripod so the rotation point (of your ballhead or panning base) is under the lens, not the camera sensor plane (where the tripod mount is). The closer objects are to your camera, the more "calibrated" your adjustment of the rail to the lens must be. In general, just putting the rotation point under the center of the lens will help with most parallax issues.

Nice illustration, BTW!

[Bcrary3]

If it helps any my tripod is a Slik u-212

[KevinR]

I'm not sure if your main issue is with creating the pano image, or the clipping into 3 for printing, but presume it is the pano generation from your comments about aligning edges of image fields. Otherwise, just generate a pano and then clip 3 images from this.

Panorama image production is very easy, but is not generally done with carefully aligning image frames, but rather is all in PP software. You don't even need a tripod, but you do need to have generous overlap between the images so that the software can identify the overlaps and stitch the images perfectly. I do overlaps of about 25% or more between images. I use Hugin (freeware open source), but there are several other options. Example from 10-11 vertical images across. PS: best to shoot manual exposure and WB, but software will even fix these differences within reason.

[Bcrary3]

Seems simple enough, from my understanding, just take a couple shots (likely 3 or 4 for landscape?) with roughly 25% overlay frame to frame, and stitch it together in Adobe?

[jbinpg]

"Separated" panoramas for triptychs or polyptichs such as this is something I do when on descent in a plane and I have a window seat. There is separation between frames and no distortion since the camera is still and the plane is doing the moving.

Jack

[Just1MoreDave]

I'm not sure if your main issue is with creating the pano image, or the clipping into 3 for printing...

In case anyone is looking for how to divide a pano into several parts for printing, Photoshop has a Slice tool. It is grouped with the Crop tool so you may not see it at first, just right-click on the Crop tool and choose Slice instead. With that tool I was able to divide a pano into 5 equal parts, print and frame them as a... uh, quintych?

[Racer X 69]

If it helps any my tripod is a Slik u-212

I have used my Slik U-212 for panoramic work for over 30 years.

[Bcrary3]

Okay, so I have been playing around with photo merge via Adobe Bridge CS6; and I am seeing that some parts of the photo are not really in focus, what I am curious about is how exactly do I want to compose/focus on a part that I wish to have as a part of a pano?

[LeChuck]

It's important for all the images of your panorama to have the same depth of field.

On your first photo, set your aperture properly and focus where you need to, then switch to manual focus for the other shots, unless you are confident that the AF will pick the right distance each time. That depends on your scene and what objects are in it near of far.

Also, it's important to keep the exposure identical between shots. For that, use manual exposure as well.

For exposure and focus, it's better to first take a test shot to get your settings right, then start the panorama in the same spot after that.

[rawr]

For panos I can certainly recommend Microsoft Image Composite Editor (very easy to use, powerful and free) and Hugin (powerful, open-source, reasonably easy to use).

Some subjects that include water and motion are always a problem though.


Sunset fisherman panorama on Flickr

The in-built software in the Sony RX100 does a decent job at panos, if you want to do panos the easy way:

Arboretum south view panorama on Flickr