Panoramas

What would you say is the best ratio for panorama photos? Is there a standard that photo labs use for instance?
I am thinking of doing a project which involves a series of panoramas, which I ultimately would want to get professionally printed.
Also I don't have a panorama head for my tripod, just a good ball head. How essential is a panorama head?

Not sure if this helps: but I think there may be a standard panorama ratio since my Optio Mini is switchable between standard 24x36 and a letterbox format. I only used the feature a couple of times but high street labs were able to print it correctly. Right now the battery is flat because it hasn't been used in years so I cant fire it up.

However the pro lab I use locally have printed some oddly proportioned prints for me that just involved trimming off excess white paper. I use a Manfrotto 3-way head with two spirit levels and a scaled panning guide which makes life very easy for 360 deg. web stuff. If you are really careful then your pano software should sort out any vertical variance and you can, of course, do the overlaps by eye. In theory the camera should be pivoting on the nodal point of the lens but this may be carrying things too far!

Ken

Hi Gwyn this company prints panoramas ezprints
Nederlands fotopanorama

I did a panorama once by unscrewing the bal head from the tripod, do you know what I mean? it isn't as preciese but I find it good enough for the one or two I make a year

It might be so that you can print quite long so if you buy a A2 size paper and cut it in half lentgh wise, it's twice as long as a A4 so 210mm by 594mm if you want to try some home printing.
Just checked and the Canon standing here can print that size never tried it though but might be fun to do

I use just my B&S head, the tripod has a spirit level built in, so I get this level, then using a hot shoe mounted spirit level I get the camera level too. I can then just rotate the head (it has a seperate pan control, Manfrotto 468, I think ), with the camera and tripod level.

That's fine for shots like these:










...because there's not much in the foreground. If you have more foreground things overlapping the background, a proper pano head would be better, but I've always managed without.

I generally use a 50mm lens with the camera in portrait format. The house above was 5 shots, the others were about 14 or so.

Dan

Thanks everyone. Stefan that Dutch site looks interesting.
I shall have a go at my project when the weather dries out a bit and see how it goes. I may abandon it after a couple of tries anyway. I have a couple of other ideas to try out too.
It is for a project I'm doing, at the local cultural centre, along with others who were on my photo course. We have a title - Kijk op Soest (Look at Soest) and we have to put our own interpretation on it, which sounds easy at first but in fact is proving quite difficult. Tourist office brochure photos are not the intention needless to say - not that Soest has much to attract a tourist any way.

Slightly different thread, but related to panoramas, nevertheless. I wish to use 360degree panoramas of gardens on my website. There are quite a lot of packages on the market. From what I have read so far, quite easy to use and provide the images. The software constructs the panorama, given the proper parameters. Would any one of you have any experience with these off-the-shelf packages and any recommendations? Particularly, I guess for their suitablity over various computer OSs?