Do's and Don'ts for perfect pano's

[sanfairyanne]

I wondered if someone could suggest somewhere I could really learn how to take pano's. I know the basics, manual focus, tripod, overlap, no polariser, manual exposure etc. Looking at my two screen grabs you can see one shot of the Morning Glory pool at Yosemite is flawed primarily because I missed out an image!
I haven't a clue what is causing the rest of the obvious issues. I tried processing this in CS5 and Ptgui.

The second image shot with a 24mm prime seems ok even if the river doesn't actually wrap around like it does in the resulting image.

There seems to be plenty of help online but it appears geared to the novice shooting with a point and shoot.
As an example:

I had an issue processing a pano' of a building with vertical struts, it was suggested I work in Ptgui and use vertical control points. This was great advice, I just want to know where I can find more, there's probably questions I haven't even thought to ask.

Perhaps someone can suggest a good book.


Many thanks

[BaltimoreBob]

Take a look at the PTGui Google Groups forum

[sanfairyanne]

Thanks Bob, I didn't know a thing about PTgui Google Group Forum

[nick fan]

some good tutorials
http://www.johnhpanos.com/tuts.htm
links to more tutorial
http://www.johnhpanos.com/links.htm

Nick

[sanfairyanne]

Nick, Thanks very much for that, the tutorials look very informative, I instantly bookmarked both sites.

[panoguy]

Perhaps someone can suggest a good book.

I also like a good book in my hand that I can dog-ear and peruse when I have time. Sadly, digital stitched panoramic photography is a small enough niche that there are almost no books available, or the good ones are out of print and haven't been updated along with current software. So forums and the scattershot tutorials on the web are your best bet. Otherwise, try to find a local "pro" and I'm sure they could teach you tips and tricks to get you over the latest bump on your road to perfection!

BTW, I love the light and tones of that river image! It looks "curved" because the field of view you captured was quite wide, and to squish it into a flat image without distorting the edges... well, something must give! Your horizontals gave in. See if rendering the image to a different projection type (like "Pannini" or whatever PTGui calls their version... "Vedutismo"?) can help the sense of perspective in space...