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Manual Settings

April 14th, 2020

The first thing that needs to be considered when attempting to shoot a series of images for stitching into a panorama are the camera settings. For consistent, quality results everything should be taken off of auto and set manually.  

Most grand vistas are going to have a range of light intensities and light temperatures that will cause the auto settings of your camera to kick in and automatically adjust to compensate. In any single image that’s beneficial but those changes will make it challenging if not impossible to achieve invisible blending in a picture composited from multiple images. 

This picture, which is a composite of five images, of the Hinkley Shoe Tree just outside of Hinkley, Utah illustrates my point. The top and bottom regions are relatively light when compared to the middle of the picture. Had I used auto settings, blending of the five images would have been more difficult than using consistent, manually configured settings. 

(Fujifilm X100T, 23mm, 1/320s, f/9, ISO 200, infrared conversion)