This is my first attempt at an exposure-fused panorama, and I’m reasonably pleased with how it came out. It was a trick shot of the #Supermoon rising over Mt. Helix here in San Diego. Shot on my E-M1ii with the 40-150mm f4-5.6 at 70mm, f4, an ISO 1000. Four panels with +/- 1.5ev before the moon rose up, and then another of just the moon at -3ev once it was in position. I’ve put together a pano head for my tripod using some relatively inexpensive parts from Amazon and Ebay, so it wasn’t too hard to swing it all together relatively quickly. I used a combination of Darktable (to develop the raws), Hugin (to stitch the stacks-exposure-fused pano, without the moon), and the GIMP (to blend the moon in) to create the final stitched image. Fun times!
PS, next time, I would shoot with lower ISO for the panorama shots. Noise removal in DT leads to overly smoothed details and a bit of weirdness in the sky.
The breakthrough for my diy pano head were these really affordable compact indexed rotators. Two of them plus a couple of cheap nodal sliders and an L bracket make for a pretty good multi-row pano rig!
I found a good technique for dialing in the nodal point. Use the lens you are going to use for your panorama shooting, and set tripod up inside your house, so that you are looking out through a window with a vertical slat (or a piece of tape) to something vertical in the distance (power pole, side of house, Palm tree, etc.). You should be pretty close to that window, and arranged so that the distant vertical object is just to the side of the vertical slat in the window. Try to dial in the nodal point on your sliders “by eye”, then set focus to the distant object and lock exposure settings in manual mode (just so the camera doesn’t hunt around). Then pan the camera back and forth across the horizontal axis. If you are aligned at the “nodal” point, then the apparent space between the distant vertical object and the vertical window slat should not change as you pan. If it does change, then make small adjustments until it doesn’t. Note the markings on your nodal sliders in your notebook (or phone app). If you are doing a multi-row pano set up, you also have to do this with a horizontal line and vertical panning too. If you use a zoom lens, you have to do this for all the different focal lengths you might use. All in all, it should only take a couple of minutes to dial in your lens, and since you are writing all the settings down, you only have to do this once.
