2.1. Stage 1

2.1.1. The best time to shoot?

I would be on location in Reims for only a day, so I had to decide the best time to take the photographs. I quickly chose the end of the day, when the bluish twilight outside would blend nicely with the warm lighting of the room. This would also allow me to avoid having overly bright halos around the windows.

I then had to solve the other major problem inherent in photographing interiors: the glare on areas close to artificial light sources, such as the table in the right foreground. This phenomenon is often made worse by digital cameras, which can quickly turn highlights into hot spots. The simplest way to solve the problem is to shoot two identical photographs at different exposures, use Photoshop to combine the images, and use the resulting picture as part of the assembled series in the final panorama.

At midday, the halo around windows is very difficult to eliminate, even when you use two superimposed photographs.

2.1.2. A panoramic head?

Today's panorama assembly programs are so powerful they can create montages that are very hard to distinguish from a photograph taken with a true panoramic film camera. Combined with Photoshop's masking, retouching, and blending capabilities, you can create extremely realistic-looking photographs without a big financial investment.

To assemble a panorama, a number of applications can stitch together photos without visible seams. The programs vary, of course, but they all work much better if the adjacent photographs overlap by 15–20% and are taken from the same vantage point, with the lens's entry point located precisely above the rotation axis. (The lens entry point is the point inside a camera lens where the light paths cross before being focused on the film plane. On fixed-length lenses—but not zoom lenses—it is the same as the nodal point.)

Sliding plates and a rotation index guide on the Manfrotto head make it very easy to rotate the camera the exact number of degrees required for pictures at a given focal length.

I used a Manfrotto QTVR 303SPH panoramic head with three sliding plates. Even when the camera is tilted, its lens entry point remains exactly above the pivot point, so the perspective doesn't change.

2.1.3. How many pictures?

For this project, I would need to take five photographs with a 28mm lens (or six with a 35mm) to match a Noblex's field of view—about 135° horizontally—while preserving a 15% overlap between the pictures. Most stitching programs can only do their calculations correctly if the horizon line is in the center of the photograph. That wasn't appropriate for this project, since I wanted to point my camera slightly downward. So I decided to use one of the few assembly programs that gives you complete freedom in shooting: PanaVue Image-Assembler 2.12.

Warning—don't use a perspective correction lens! Just use your camera normally and tilt it up or down, depending on what part of the picture you want to emphasize or hide; the software will correct the perspective automatically. In this picture, the vertical lines are clearly converging downward.