How do I shoot panorama shot with Nikon D3300?

How do I shoot panorama shot with Nikon D3300?

Sofa

There are literally thousands of videos on YouTube on how to shoot panos. Most will show how using various pano heads and sliding nodal rails is the best way to make a pano. This is because when you use a nodal rail you remove parallax which makes stitching all of the images more accurate.

You don't need an expensive pano head and rail system to make a pano. Just follow these instructions:

1) Shoot RAW - This is so you can control the white balance and have the greatest amount of editing capabilities.
2) Put the camera in manual exposure so that the exposure is constant with all of the images.
3) Set the lens for manual focus.
4) Hold the camera in a portrait position to get the highest MP.
5) Then just simply start either at the bottom of your composition or top and move left to right.
6) If hand-holding the camera, be sure to shoot more area than you need so that you have enough data to edit/crop later on. It's common for the stitched image to have an arch at the bottom.
7) Use Photoshop, Lightroom or various other apps to stitch all of the frames together.

Set your camera to manual exposure (aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance) and focus. Set your exposure to expose properly for the brightest part of your scene (don't blow out your highlights). Histogram and highlight modes are handy for setting exposure. Set your focus at the desired spot (learn about hyperfocal distance).

Take multiple shots with at least 30% overlap while rotating the axis of the camera. If your pano doesn't have any objects close by (within 10m), you can either use a tripod or hand-hold. Ideally, you want to rotate the camera about it's "nodal" point to minimize parallax issues. This becomes very important when you have objects close to the camera.

In addition to panning horizontally, you can also pan vertically, or horizontally and vertically.

The nodal point (in reality, the apparent aperture position) needs to be determined experimentally for each lens, zoom setting, and aperture setting. People who are serious about this use a special jig which allows them offset the camera from the tripod socket so the camera rotates around the nodal point.

The lens I usually use for panos (18-140mm, usually set in the 18 to 40mm range), the nodal point is close to the end of the lens if the aperture is wide open and about mid barrel for f/8 to f/13. Most of my panos, I place my finger tip under the lens barrel at mid-length. I rotate the camera about my finger tip. It's best to stabilize your body by sitting or leaning on something. This produces good results for landscape panos.

Stitch your pano in some sort of program. Newer versions of Photoshop and Lightroom can stitch your images. Hugin, a free stitching program, can be used to stitch, as well as do focus stacking, HDR, and linear translation panos. I prefer Hugin over Photoshop as Hugin gives better control over the process and has additional tools that I use. You'll find that modern stitchers can reduce parallax issues via smart cutting, but don't depend on it.

When you start out, just take 3 overlapping JPEG images and then process them in your favorite stitcher. The hardest part is learning the program. Explore the various options of the stitcher to see what they do.

When you are done learning, shoot in raw and supply the stitching program with 16-bit TIFFs. This will allow the stitching program more latitude in adjusting lens issues (vignetting). It also gives you more latitude in adjusting the exposure in your final product.

There are many resources on the Internet that give a more comprehensive explanation than what can be done here.

All of your answers are in the manual that you tossed aside & neglected to read.

With a panorama lens

Take the shot normally with the landscape at the middle of the picture. In the computer, imagine dividing the picture horizontally into three parts. Crop off the top and bottom parts. There, instant panorama!

People often forget they've taken a series of shots for a pano, or where the shots start and end - take a picture of something obvious such as your hand at the start and end. When you're culling your shots it'll be obvious which ones are to be stitched.

Rotate slowly as you are shooting the series, then use Auto Panoram Stitch in Windows Live Photo Editor. That works with any camera when you have shot a series to make a panorama.

A tip: Shoot with the camera upright (portrait shape), and overlap by about a third in each pic.

You would know how if you had ever taken the time to Read The Owner's Manual.