I'd call myself an advanced beginner in terms of shooting panoramas and I'd like to improve my technique in this area. My current workflow goes something like this:
Set up the tripod and level the panning clamp. I use one of the RRS pano kits. Secure the camera to the pano head and eyeball it so that the center of the lens is over the rotation point of the tripod (my quickie technique to determine the nodal point/exit pupil of the lens).
Look thru the finder and get a rough idea of the FOV and how many degrees I can rotate my pano head between shots. Typically I'll select an overlap of approximately 20%.
Set the exposure mode to manual, meter the scene, take a test shot and check the histo. Adjust as necessary. Typically with MF I'll shoot these at f/11 or smaller depending on the lens' aperture range (thinking... max DOF but avoid diffraction here).
Focus manually on a distant point, take the first shot, rotate the pano head the number of degrees I determined above, continue the row.
If I'm shooting multi-row aim the camera upward allowing for approximately the same overlap selected earlier and continue shooting. If I'm looking to make a 360 degree pano I'll do the same thing with the camera pointing straight upwards and straight downwards.
In post I'll load up the images and convert to either 8 bit tiff or jpg with an eye on keeping the final file size manageable. If it's a one row pano I'll use Photoshop's photomerge. I'm also trying out some specialty software like PT Gui and AutoPano Pro. Process the images... look at the final garbled result asking me to manually find control points and wonder why I bother with this
Set up the tripod and level the panning clamp. I use one of the RRS pano kits. Secure the camera to the pano head and eyeball it so that the center of the lens is over the rotation point of the tripod (my quickie technique to determine the nodal point/exit pupil of the lens).
Look thru the finder and get a rough idea of the FOV and how many degrees I can rotate my pano head between shots. Typically I'll select an overlap of approximately 20%.
Set the exposure mode to manual, meter the scene, take a test shot and check the histo. Adjust as necessary. Typically with MF I'll shoot these at f/11 or smaller depending on the lens' aperture range (thinking... max DOF but avoid diffraction here).
Focus manually on a distant point, take the first shot, rotate the pano head the number of degrees I determined above, continue the row.
If I'm shooting multi-row aim the camera upward allowing for approximately the same overlap selected earlier and continue shooting. If I'm looking to make a 360 degree pano I'll do the same thing with the camera pointing straight upwards and straight downwards.
In post I'll load up the images and convert to either 8 bit tiff or jpg with an eye on keeping the final file size manageable. If it's a one row pano I'll use Photoshop's photomerge. I'm also trying out some specialty software like PT Gui and AutoPano Pro. Process the images... look at the final garbled result asking me to manually find control points and wonder why I bother with this