While in Yellowstone, there was not a day when I did not see black bears. First day I was super excited about seeing a bear cub walk alone and eat flowers, so I took several hundred pictures of him eating, resting and playing. My favorite picture was with the cub sitting in between many wildflowers. Of course those pictures are all gone, so it is only a memory. During the next bear encounters, I only photographed when the bears were close. For the first couple of shots, I would use the Nikon D5100 and then switch to my D3s, due to better and more accurate autofocus. Here are some images of bears from the Nikon D5100 + Nikon 200-400mm f/4 VR combo.

This is a black bear that some call “Cinnamon” bear:

This guy was rubbing his back on a tree trunk:

And then eventually moved on:

Another bear that got very close to us (less than 100 yards):

By the end of the week, whenever I saw black bears, I would just move on, since I was more interested in seeing grizzlies instead. A video of a grizzly bear roaming around will be posted shortly.

We saw plenty of other wildlife in Yellowstone and I took many pictures of coyotes, hawks, falcons and eagles, pronghorns, mountains goats and more. Don’t ask me where those images are! The biggest loss was pictures of 6 coyote cubs playing and one adult coyote catching and eating a ground squirrel. My previous coyote pictures were a joke in comparison. Oh well, let’s move on.

I rarely even look at bison in Yellowstone. Because they are just everywhere. While driving through one of the roads, I noticed a calf feeding at sunset and took a picture from the car window:

Here are some other pictures of Yellowstone taken with the Nikon D5100:

These two crows were enjoying the early morning at Yellowstone:

And wildflowers were everywhere:

It turns out July is a great month to be in Yellowstone.

On the road to Glacier, I found this old truck and took a picture:

We started our first day at Two Medicine, which is the southern part of the park. There was a waterfall, very close to our campsite and we hiked there to take some pictures. This is one of the first pictures from Glacier:

Never take pictures of waterfalls in sunny days!

Again, wildflowers were everywhere:

Lakes and waterfalls were breathtaking:

Some more pictures of the Two Medicine lake:

Here is Saint Mary lake during on a windy day:

And more waterfalls:

Here is Avalanche Creek’s rain-forest:

Sunrise at Saint Mary Lake:

This prairie chicken showed up while I was taking pictures of mountain peaks and just stood there. I switched from my Nikon 24-70mm to 200-400mm f/4 and took this picture while it stood still:

Another sunrise shot of St Mary Lake on a clear morning with the moon:

Hope you like these, although it is a pity that most of the good pictures have been lost.

Since I did not carry a fisheye lens with me at the time and I had the Nikon 24-70mm attached to the D700, I could not fit much into the frame. Setting up a tripod inside the Kiva was not an option either, since it would take up additional space making it even more difficult to capture this tight space. The solution I came up with, was to lean against the wall and shoot 8-10 vertical frames hand-held @ 24mm using ISO 1600 to create a panorama. One problem, however, was the fact that I would never be able to stitch a panorama if I moved my camera from one side to another (like I typically do) without worrying about the nodal point (if you do not know what a nodal point is or want to find out how to properly photograph panoramas, check out my “how to photograph panoramas” article). What I did was I used the hand-held panoramic technique, which is described in the above link in section 3.3 #10 of the article, where I held the middle of the lens and rotated around it.

As you can see, the panorama stitched perfectly fine!

iPhone Panorama

I stitched the panorama in Adobe Photoshop CS5, then brightened up the grass a little and slightly increased contrast. I think the result is OK, although the colors are a little out of whack…still not bad for a crappy phone camera (the new iPhone 4G is supposed to have a much better 5 megapixel camera). As Chase Jarvis puts it, the best camera is the one that is with you :)

Dead Horse Point Panorama at Sunrise

Have you had a situation before, where you stood on top of a mountain or some sort of outlook and enjoyed a beautiful view that seemed to span from far left to far right, making you move your head just to see everything? If you have had one of those moments, I am sure you really wished that you could capture the beauty with your digital camera. While some of the modern cameras have video recording capabilities and you could certainly capture the whole scene through video, what if you wanted to print it out? The good news is that the technology today allows us to capture such scenes through a panoramic photography technique.

1) What is Panoramic Photography?

Panoramic photography, also known as wide format photography, is a special technique that stitches multiple images from the same camera together to form a single, wide photograph (vertical or horizontal). The term “panorama” literally means “all sight” in Greek and it first originated from painters that wanted to capture a wide view of a landscape, not just a certain part of it. The first panoramic photographs were made by simply aligning printed versions of film, which did not turn out very well, because it was close to impossible to perfectly align photographs. With the invention of personal computing, advancements in computer software and digital photography, it is now much easier to stitch digital images together using specialized software. In fact, using a proper photography technique and panoramic equipment, it is now possible to create near-perfect panoramas at extremely high resolutions. Some photographers even stitch hundreds of high resolution images to create gargantuan “gigapixel” panoramas. Today, digital panoramic photography is quite popular and common not only among landscape photographers, but also among architectural and cityscape photographers.

Panoramic Photography can get quite complex and expensive, depending on what you are trying to do. For example, creating panoramic images in architectural photography requires camera and lens to be properly calibrated on special panoramic equipment to prevent curved lines, distortions and improper stitches of close objects. At the same time, you can successfully take great landscape panoramic images without investing on any camera equipment, as long as you know how to do it right. In this article, I will primarily focus on taking panoramic images either hand-held or with a tripod, without spending on any other equipment.

2) Types of Panoramas

While the word “panorama” automatically assumes that it will be a wide horizontal or vertical image, in my opinion, it does not necessarily have to be. If I stitch several images together and it turns out to be a square image, I still consider it to be a high resolution panoramic image. Here is how I define panoramic images:

1) Wide angle panoramas – anything that looks like a wide angle photograph, which covers less than 180 degrees, whether horizontal or vertical. Wide angle panoramas can even look like regular images, except they are stitched from several photographs and therefore would have more resolution.

Yosemite, wide angle panorama

2) 180 degree panoramas – panoramas that cover 180 degrees from left to right. These types of panoramas look very wide, covering a large area.

Zabriskie Point, 180 degree panorama

3) 360 degree panoramas – panoramas that cover up to 360 degrees. These panoramas look extremely wide and they cover the whole scene in a single, super wide image.

360 Degree Panorama

4) Spherical panoramas – also known as “planets”. These are 360 degree panoramas that are converted to a square spherical image using a special post-processing technique.

Spherical Panorama

All of the above panoramas can either be photographed in a single row (meaning one row of vertical or horizontal images) or multiple rows (higher focal length is often used to yield much higher resolutions. Multi-row panoramas often require special panoramic equipment).

3) How to Photograph Panoramas

Let’s now get to the meat – how do you capture panoramic images that will be used to create a panorama? There are two ways to capture panoramic images:

1. Taking horizontal shots – an easy method for quick panoramas, where resolution is not important. Here are two sample horizontal shots:
   

   And here is the final stitched panorama (click here for larger version):
   

2. Taking vertical shots – a preferred way to capture panoramas. Vertical images capture more of the sky and ground and yield higher resolution panoramas compared to horizontal ones. Here are four vertical shots:
   

   And here is the final stitched panorama:

   

I personally try to avoid shooting horizontally, because I lose too much resolution due to some cropping that is required after the panorama is stitched by software. Vertical panoramas are much better in that regard and they always yield more resolution than horizontal panoramas.

As you can see from the above sample images, the shots I took overlap each other by approximately 50%. In order for any program to be able stitch multiple images together, the images have to overlap each other by a certain margin, so that alignment points are properly identified. The alignment points serve as flags for the stitching algorithm that seamlessly merges the images and cuts out the rest of the image. The overlap margin is a subject of opinion and while some people recommend 20-30% overlap, I personally do it by about 50% (see why below).

3.1) Camera Equipment

1. Digital Camera – as far as the camera itself, any camera should work, as long as the exposure (aperture, shutter speed and ISO) can be locked. Ideally, you want a digital camera that can shoot in full Manual mode (preferably a DSLR).
2. Lens – I find zoom lenses to be the most useful for panoramic photography. You can certainly photograph panoramas with fixed/prime lenses, but being able to zoom in and out will give you more options and versatility, especially in difficult conditions where your movements are limited. If you have a DSLR, any wide zoom lens such as Nikon 18-55mm or Nikon 18-200mm should work perfectly fine. I personally use the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G lens for most of my panoramas and I have been very happy with the results.
3. Lens Filters – I recommend taking filters off your lens while shooting panoramas. It is OK to keep a clear filter on, as long as it is not introducing any vignetting to your images on the wide end. Definitely remove a circular polarizer if you have one mounted on your lens, because it will screw up your sky. Here is how bad it can get:
   

   Circular Polarizer Mess

4. Tripod – a tripod is optional, but highly recommended for best results. Any sturdy tripod should work, but make sure that the head is flexible enough for you to be able to pan from left to right with ease. See my “how to choose and buy a tripod” article if you want to buy a tripod for your DSLR.
5. Cable Release – optional, but recommended for capturing shake-free images.
6. Panoramic Setup – a full panoramic setup is ideal for best results, but it is very expensive ($500+). Not recommended for beginners due to complexity of use, but a must-have for professionals that want to sell their images.

3.2) Camera Settings

Before you start taking panoramic images, you have to change some of the settings on your camera. Here is what I recommend to set in your camera:

• Shoot in “Manual” mode – the most important thing in panoramas is consistency of exposures. It is imperative that no matter how bright or dark parts of the scene might be, your images must have the same exposure. If your camera allows locking exposure, you can certainly shoot in other modes, but I suggest to shoot in Manual mode to prevent possible accidents. I have screwed up many panoramas, assuming that I properly locked my exposure, after which I started shooting exclusively in Manual mode for panoramas.
• Set your lens to Manual Focus – if you have a DSLR, focus your lens on a distant object (infinity or near infinity), then switch to manual focus. You do not want your camera to change focus every time you take a picture.
• ISO – make sure that “Auto ISO” is turned off and set your ISO to the camera base ISO (either 100 or 200).
• Aperture and Shutter Speed – for panoramic images, you want to have everything in focus. Therefore, make sure that your aperture is set to a good number that will put everything, including any foreground elements, into perfect focus. Depending on your lens focal length, you should set your aperture to at least f/8, preferably f/10 and higher (depending on how close the nearest foreground object is). Once you set the right aperture, set your shutter speed based on the meter reading as explained below.
• Metering – in terms of metering, do not meter off the brightest or darkest areas of the scene, but rather try to find a “sweet middle” and set your shutter speed based on that area for the entire panorama. Take a couple of pictures and make sure that the images are not too overexposed or underexposed for the brightest and darkest parts of the scene.
• Lens Focal Length – ultra wide and wide-angle lenses below 24-28mm on FX sensors and 16-18mm on DX sensors typically have heavy distortion and vignetting issues that can make it difficult to properly align and stitch images. For example, when I mount my Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G lens on an FX body such as Nikon D700, I get visible distortion and vignetting at 24mm. Gladly, both distortion and vignetting are very easy to deal with in Lightroom 3 Lens Correction, but if I did not use Lightroom or some other tool to automatically correct these lens problems, I would probably skip the 24mm focal length for shooting panoramic images. Typically, the focal lengths I use the most for panoramas are between 28mm to 50mm on full-frame FX bodies and 18mm to 35mm on DX, depending on the lens.
• Shoot in RAW – I always recommend shooting in RAW for best results. See my RAW vs JPEG article to see why you should be shooting RAW.
• White Balance – set your White Balance to “Auto” when shooting in RAW and change later, if necessary.

3.3) Shooting Technique

Let’s proceed to the fun part – shooting panoramas. Once you have the equipment setup and ready to go, follow these instructions:

1. Identify the area you want to photograph. The first thing you need to do, is identify what you want to capture. The best candidates for panoramic images are overlooks, i.e. standing on the top of a mountain or hill, or looking down from an elevated area with no near objects. Avoid shooting panoramas with trees, bushes and other objects in the foreground, unless you have special calibrated panoramic equipment. If you are shooting a scene that is far away from you, the panorama will stitch perfectly, because the software will not have to deal with parallax errors.
2. Watch for wind and other moving objects. Wind can move tree leaves, grass, water and sand in different directions, which will spoil your panorama. Only shoot in windy conditions when the wind strongly moves everything in one direction. Avoid taking pictures of moving water waves.
3. If you will be using a tripod, set the tripod on a firm surface and level it. Once it is leveled, mount your camera on the tripod horizontally or vertically and firmly tighten it. Make sure that you can freely pan the camera from one side to another without letting it change any angles. Try to watch for alignment errors by matching the lines in your viewfinder with the horizon.
4. If shooting hand-held, keep the camera close to your eye and look through the viewfinder instead of the back LCD. Pan from left to right and see whether you can keep the camera straight and aligned against the horizon.
5. Set your camera settings as shown above and make sure that the exposure is fully locked.
6. Check camera focus and make sure that autofocus is disabled.
7. Note the starting point and ending point you will be photographing and visually remember both.
8. Take a single picture and see if the image looks good on the back LCD. If the image looks good, you are ready to shoot. If it doesn’t, check your exposure settings and make changes, if necessary.
9. Point your camera at your starting point on the left and take the first picture. Before you move the camera, remember where your center focus point inside your viewfinder is pointing, then start moving the camera to the right, until that point is at the center edge of the frame. This basically means that you will be overlapping your new image with the first one by approximately 50%. Take a picture and repeat this process until you get to the end point. Remembering where the center focus point is at relative to the scene is the easiest and safest way for me to make sure that the images overlap enough for post-processing software to be able to stitch them later. You can certainly overlap them by a smaller margin and decrease the total number of images, so it is totally up to you on how you want to do this. Just make sure that the images overlap by at least 20% and there are visible stationary objects that will allow the stitching program to identify them and connect them later.
10. If shooting hand-held, stand in one spot, keep your elbows close to your body and rotate only the upper part of your body, keeping the camera close to your head at all times. Imagine that your legs are a tripod and your upper body is a tripod head. This will minimize the effect of parallax on your images. If you have any nearby objects and you want to try to minimize parallax errors, try the following technique: using your left thumb and index fingers, hold the middle of the lens and try to take pictures while not moving your arm (your body needs to remain still). This is difficult to do because you will not be able to look through the viewfinder, but not impossible :) I have taken a few panoramic images this way and they stitched perfectly! Each lens is different and the entrance pupil (which is the point where close and distant objects keep their relative positions when the lens is rotated) location also varies depending on mechanical and optical characteristics of the lens. Your two fingers need to hold the bottom of the lens where the entrance pupil is (not the nodal point like many incorrectly assume) and the camera needs to rotate around it.
11. Once you are done taking the pictures, visually inspect all images on the LCD at least once to make sure that you do not have any problems with your setup.

Black Canyon, captured hand-held

The easiest and quickest panoramas can be done by hand-holding your camera. Believe it or not, but most of my panoramas are done hand-held! They might not be as perfect as I want them to be in some cases, but they are still darn good – good enough to print on large paper. Try out the above and see how it works out for you.

3.4) Using a Panoramic Head

If you want to get serious with panoramas, you should invest in a good panoramic setup, which will allow you to take pictures without worrying about parallax issues. There are plenty of different solutions out there and the most popular ones are by Nodal Ninja, Manfrotto and RRS, the latter being the number one choice for professionals. With a good panoramic head, you can have the camera setup rotate around the entrance pupil of the lens and take perfect single-row or multi-row panoramas that will stitch without any problems.

4) Stitching Panoramas in Software

Once you are done taking the pictures, you then need to stitch them using specialized software that is capable of handling panoramas. I will only show how to use Photoshop and PTGui, but you are more than welcome to try other panoramic tools.

4.1) Using Adobe Photoshop

Stitching panoramas in Photoshop is super easy. If you use Lightroom, simply select the images and then right click, “Edit In”->”Merge to Panorama in Photoshop…”. If you do not use Lightroom, simply open up Photoshop and then go to “File”->”Automate”->Photomerge…”. A dialog box will come up that looks like this:

The images will automatically show up if you use Lightroom. If you do it from Photoshop, simply click “Browse” and select the images to be merged into a panorama. Make sure that “Blend Images Together” and “Geometric Distortion Correction” are checked, then click OK. This will start the stitching process, which can sometimes take a long time, depending on the number of images and their size. Once the process is completed, all you have to do is crop the image and you are all set!

4.2) Using PTGui

Besides Photoshop, there are plenty of different panoramic tools out there and PTGui is certainly the most popular one. I have been using it for years and I really like it, although I must admit that Photoshop does a better job at stitching problematic panoramas. Once you open PTGui, click on the “Load images…” button, select the images you want to stitch then click “Open” to open the images within PtGui. Once the images are fully loaded, click the “Align images…” button and let PTGui calculate the connecting points. Once the process is complete, you will see a new window that looks like this:

Select the right projection for your panorama then return to the main screen and click the “Create Panorama…” button, which will take you to a separate tab. Set the right size and format of the image and click the “Create Panorama” button to start the stitching process.

PTGui has a lot more stitching options than Photoshop and you can customize pretty much anything, even manually set control points and select various stitching algorithms.

5) Challenges with Panoramic Photography

The biggest challenge with panoramic photography is stitching problems due to parallax errors. I highly recommend reading the Wikipedia article on parallax to fully understand why it presents such a big problem for photography. Once you learn the right ways to take images and minimize parallax, you can start taking great panoramic images!

Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments section below.

The above is a panoramic image that I shot hand-held with the 24mm f/1.4G. It did not get stitched properly due to parallax errors, but the bad stitches are not that visible because of the moving sand. The 24mm was not wide enough for a single shot and I knew that it wouldn’t work, but I only took one lens with me and I did not have much choice…

I will soon write an article about Panorama stitching techniques, where I will go into more details about the above problem.

All 8 shots were taken in Manual mode at f/8 and 1/10th of a second, ISO 200. Whenever you shoot panoramic images, always remember to switch to full manual mode to get identical exposure. You do not want your shutter speed or your aperture to change when you move from one point to another and shooting in manual will always yield consistent results for stitching software. Do not forget to disable Auto ISO as well – you want to keep your ISO at the lowest value for the best image quality. I will explain all of the above in a detailed “howto” that I’m currently working on.

I was initially planning to go through I-70 directly to Grand Junction and stay overnight. After a rock fell on the highway and destroyed a portion of it, we detoured through highway 287. On the way to Grand Junction, we stopped at a local farm to take some pictures of the cows early in the morning:

This one looked at me, wondering what I was up to:

Next, we headed straight to Arches. The park was flooded with rain from a couple of days before, so there were plenty of interesting pools in the area:

All clouds disappeared from the sky and we were just left with the blue sky:

Our last hike of the day was Delicate Arch. Although I posted some pictures of the arch right here, here is a panoramic version of the arch:

We stayed at the arch for a while and ended up leaving at night. When we came to the parking lot, the sky was very clear and full of beautiful stars. I spotted Orion and took a shot:

We decided to come back to the Arches next day to photograph the Window Arch at sunrise. As the sun started appearing in the horizon, I turned back and snapped a picture:

It is an HDR shot that I colorized in Photoshop, because the ground looked very pale.

Sunrise at the Window Arch was not what I expected. The clouds were on the other side and the sky was plain blue again…I was really hoping to get some clouds in the sky!

Nevertheless, I still went ahead and got a shot of the Turret Arch through the Window Arch:

Clouds moved in very quickly and it was supposed to rain in the evening. We took a long hike in the park and snapped some shots here and there:

The weather then started to get worse. The next two days were just horrible, but we had no idea what was awaiting us, even after we saw the “sign” :)

Stay tuned for Part 2 and a surprise at the Canyonlands!

All of the above images (except the first two) were shot with Nikon D700 and Nikon 16-35mm VR lens.

I shot with the new Nikon 16-35mm VR lens almost exclusively both on FX and DX, so I will be posting some sample images later today. The lens got abused quite a bit with over 2,500 shots, tough weather conditions (lots of dust, sand, moisture and temperatures below 15 degrees F) and I have done everything from shooting ultra wide-angle @ 16mm to 35mm @ f/22. I absolutely loved shooting with this lens and one thing for sure – the 17-35mm and the 14-24mm are no longer the best landscape lenses anymore, at least for me. Although I carried my tripod most of the time, I did not even get to use it, because the VR on the Nikon 16-35mm really worked! Being able to shoot 1/2 of a second on an ultra wide-angle lens was an awesome experience.

Oh by the way, all of the shots below with the exception of “Zabriskie Point” were shot hand-held.

1) Dune Sunset 1920×948 Panoramic Wallpaper

2) Zabriskie Point 1920×675 Panoramic Wallpaper

3) Golden Dunes 1920×687 Panoramic Wallpaper

4) Snow, Dunes and Water 1920×638 Panoramic Wallpaper

5) Cloudy Day in Mountains 1920×773 Panoramic Wallpaper

I got there late at night and stayed at the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction, which is also a hotel. Man, the place was spooky!

The hallway was scary and I was hoping not to see a ghost of some kind in there…

My room was #10, right next to the empty frame. Don’t know what the story is behind the people in the pictures, but it looked like they were generations of people who owned the place. I’m assuming that they reserved the empty frame for the next in line…

After sleeping only for a couple of hours, I got out of the place at around 4:30 AM and I’m glad I did! I don’t know if I would stay there again, although the room and the sheets were clean.

In about 30-45 minutes, I arrived to Zabriskie Point, where I was planning to photograph the sunrise. I’m glad that I started there, because I got some really nice panoramic shots of Zabriskie Point:

Zabriskie Point at Sunrise

Zabriskie Point

And some regular shots:

After which, we headed out to Badwater.

I was hoping for some white salt, but instead got this:

Afterwards, I found out that the surface changes throughout the year and it was like this because of the hot summer. Anyway, I still looked around and found a nice spot with some water:

The rest of the story will be in Part 2 tomorrow, so stay tuned!