Make Certain Your Camera Is Level

One of the things we always try to do when shooting panos is to keep as much of what was shot of the scene without having to crop a bunch away. One big thing that will help is to make sure that when you’re shooting on a tripod, your camera is perfectly level. If it’s even a little crooked, as you take each pano segment, your pano will start to tilt more and more, causing you to have to crop off quite a lot because you’ll have big gaps around your tilted, skewed pano image. This is why keeping your camera straight and level is really important. A lot of newer cameras have built-in leveling features (see page 11), so if yours does, make sure you level your camera right on the money before you start shooting. If yours doesn’t have a built-in feature, you can buy a bubble level that slips right into the hot shoe mount on the top of your camera and you can level it that way (the Vello 3-axis hot shoe bubble level is around $22). A lot of ballheads these days have bubble levels built-in, too, so check for that. Also, another thing that will help keep things level while you’re shooting is a ballhead that has a panning adjustment at the bottom of the unit that lets you smoothly swivel your camera around the vertical axis of your rig to take your pano images. It’s usually a small extra knob at the bottom that you loosen to let it swivel (look near the bottom of your ballhead for a set of vertical lines—if you see that, yours has this swivel/pan feature).