From the course: Shooting and Processing Panoramas

What is field of view?

From the course: Shooting and Processing Panoramas

Start my 1-month free trial

What is field of view?

“

- Another factor to consider is your field of view. Now essentially, the field of view is what the camera can see inside the individual exposure and changing your field of view will often mean changing your lens. If it's a zoom lens, you can go ahead and zoom in to change the field of view. The only potential drawback of shooting on a zoom lens is as you pan the camera for the panoramic photo, you might bump the lens or have it slip a little bit and that could introduce a lot of unwanted changes. I often do my panoramic shooting using prime lenses. So in my hands here, I have a 35 millimeter lens, a 50 millimeter lens, and an 85 millimeter lens on the body. These tend to do pretty much everything I need for shooting landscapes. Now, if you're going to be shooting panoramics indoors, you might find yourself using a fisheye or a really wide angle lens. Need to shoot a very busy, active scene? Then you're probably going to go really wide so you can do it with the minimum number of exposures. The lens you choose really is dependent upon what you need to accomplish. In something like a landscape where it's not moving and I've got a lot of time to make the shot, I could go with a very tight lens here. I could shoot 85 millimeters and really punch in on that action. That means it's going to take more photos to stich the shot together, resulting in a higher resolution pano. Later on, we'll take a look at the GigaPan system and for something like that, we could use a very long lens and that's going to produce extremely high resolution photos. Again, don't run out and go buy a bunch of different lenses that you don't already own but when you start to shoot panoramic photos, bring the lenses you own with you because you're going to develop a different affinity for different lenses depending upon your subject and your personal taste when it comes to shooting.

Contents