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Composition
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How can I take a shot of eg. a beach with nice rocks close to the foreground in front of the sea? Do I take a photo of the rocks, then the sea & then the sky and then merge into a panoramic in Photoshop? Can/do I take each shot with different apertures or do I keep the same f/nr but just change the focus points for each shot so the rocks look nice and crisp and big in the foreground? You know the shot I’m talking about – veyr popular but I tried it at weekend – without success :-(
Hi Kerryanne67.
I’m not very familiar with landscapes / panoramas, but from what I recall from previous threads, you would use the same aperture / shutter speed for all the shots in a panorama. Manual mode would probably be the best for this. In normal landscape photography you would focus at around 1/3rd of the distance from your position & use a small aperture (possibly around f/22) to give added DOF which will bring the rest of the scene into focus. A tripod would be essential as your shutter speed will be slow. Also use a cable / remote release if you have one to avoid camera shake.
Take a few test shots to get your focus & exposure as you want them. Set your tripod up so that you can sweep across the scene without the camera rising or falling. Having your camera in portrait mode may be best to avoid a “skinny” panorama. When you are satisfied that you are setup correctly, begin your sequence of shots shooting left to right & slightly overlap each shot by approx 1/3rd of the previous shot. all of your shots can then be joined together by stitching software.
Hope that is of some help, but the landscape photographers here can enlighten you as to anything I might have got wrong or missed. Good luckthese sites give good explanations.
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/hyperfocal-distance.htm” onclick=”window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.dofmaster.com/hyperfocal.html” onclick=”window.open(this.href);return false;Thanks for taking the time to respond – hopefully this weekend I’ll have better luck! Much appreciated :-)
….and try using a wide-angle lens, in which case you might want to get quite close to the rocks, perhaps tilting the camera until your composition looks right (just watch that the horizon doesn’t get too skewed). A lot of people seem to be afraid to go close with a w/a lens :) , may be because they erroneously think that you need to be far away to “fit everything in” or such, but getting close to your foreground subject is one of the “secrets” to making good use of a w/a lens.
Also remember: Less is more :)Thanks alot – yes it’s the rocks looking nice a big and crisp in the foreground that I want to achieve. I was never quite sure if you had to zoom on the rocks and take one shot of them in quite close then the next with the sea (with less zoom) and the next with the sky and then merge in Photoshop. Thanks alot for the advice though, much appreciated :D
Now by all means someone correct me but i have found panorams created with wide angle lenses tend to be a bit duff due to lens distortion confusing the stitching software.
If you want to do a shot with a nice foreground object and distant looking landscape beyond a sigle shot taken with a wide lens is your man as the short focal length with the small apperture f22 onwards will do the job.
If your shooting a panarama then as stated above a series of longer lens portrait shots stitched together is the better option but thats an opinion and rules can be bent and broken to get what your looking for :)
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