Summary
Learning about panorama photography for the first time can be intimidating. There’s a lot of information about it on the web, and it’s hard to know where to start. You could say workflow is more important in this type of photography than just about any other area. First, you need to have good command of your camera, lighting and composition. Do you take single exposures, or multiple HDR exposures for a certain scene? You need to know your software well—what interpolation do you use for the sharpest rendering? You might want to do some work in Adobe Camera Raw of Photoshop to remove objects like tripods or repair a minor stitching error. You might even need to know a little about html coding to be sure your pano viewer is giving your best presentation. So, to start with, there are four general areas to learn about in spherical panoramic photography:
Cameras, Lighting and Composition
Panoramic Stitching and Rendering
Raw Processing and Photoshop
Displaying Your Work
I’m going to try to organize Panotracks more or less in the sequential order that I learn about myself. Hopefully, I’ll have some clearly-organized and easy-to-understand tutorials up here soon.
The tutorials will be are taken from the actual panoramic photos posted in the portfolio section of my site. So, some of the panos I post here might not be perfect. But when they aren’t, I’ll try to share my experience in knowing what needs work and how I go about dealing with any issues. Tutorials on this site will eventually include topics like equipment, software, Photoshop, selecting locations, composition and more.
There’s a ton of great information about panorama photography out there, and a thriving community of pano photographers that are highly capable (much better than I), passionate and happy to share their experiences with you. Our plan here is to add posts to this site that are more or less in a sequential order you can follow to gradually master your art. I’ll draw upon my background in Photoshop hopefully to also come up with some new ideas on how to work with panoramas.
If we’re lucky, we’ll also be able to get some of the great panorama photographers to contribute to our site! We’ll cover a range of subjects, including beginning and advanced techniques.
Getting Started
Hardware
Software
Photoshop
Rendering
Lighting
Composition
Displaying Your Work
Hopefully, we’ll hear from others what their experiences are in getting started in panorama photography!
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