Tuesday, September 28, 2010

NX10 can create a Panoramic photo?

Following is an instruction how to make a panorama photo using a Samsung NX10 camera.

Some people might think you need a special camera or a special function to create panoramic photos. But in fact, all you need is a set of photos and some software that can merge these photos.

If you want to take panoramic photos with the NX10, it’s important that the photos can align properly. There are two conditions you need to pay attention to.

First of all, you will want the same exposure settings in every photo. This way, all the photos will be equally bright or dark, and you will not get strange brightness variations in your merged panoramic photo. The NX10 has a handy button to help you with this. When you have a scene in front of you, and you press the AEL button (Auto Exposure Lock), the camera will store the lighting condition of the scene shown in your viewfinder. This will be indicated on the back display with the green letters AEL. When you move your camera to a different scene, it will still use the lighting conditions as stored when you pressed AEL. However, after you take the following photo, the light conditions will be reset.

This might be annoying you think, as you will want to take more than one photo for the panoramic photo. However, the second thing you need to pay attention to is the fact that you use the same focal distance in all of your photos. When using the auto focus mode, you can achieve the same focal distance by keeping the shutter button half pressed after taking a photo. The auto focus system will not pick a new focus then, but instead use the focal distance from the previous photo. When using the manual focus mode, you could release the shutter button completely, as the focus will remain the same unless you change it manually.
But this is where the crucial trick is and how the two conditions above are combined. After picking a lighting scene with the AEL button, you can take a first photo. But instead of releasing the shutter button after this photo, you will need to keep it pressed halfway. You will notice the focus won’t change BUT as you can see, the green AEL letters also remain on the display. Bingo! :)

To put it another way: as long as you don’t fully release the shutter button, the AEL and focus settings will be re-used, photo after photo.

Now we can start the preparations of our panoramic photo. In the example below, I took nine photos of a scene around The Great Buddha of Kamakura. When the lighting conditions are varied, it’s important to decide which part of the panoramic photo you want to look well exposed. I wanted the ground level to be well exposed. Since it’s darker than the sky, this will result in a sky that is overexposed. But since the Buddha is dark and the light comes from behind him, overexposing him slightly seems like a good idea.


buddha0 Samsung NX10 │ 1/200s │ f/2.8 │ ISO 100 │ 30.0mm


Below are the nine photos I took:buddha1


To combine these photos, you will need some panorama stitching or merging software. Most programs will be clever enough to find out where the various photos should be aligned and merged, and in most cases you will end up with a result as shown below.


buddha2


If you want, you can cut off the wonky edges in a photo editing program by applying a crop to the whole photo. The final result is a perfect panoramic photo!


buddha3


All done! Good luck with your works!


Source from http://www.samsungimaging.net/2010/09/28/nx10-can-create-a-panoramic-photo/


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