Figure 6-7: Panning in the UP direction can make some great architectural shots.

There are a lot of things to note while shooing panoramas:

• You can’t zoom when you shoot panoramas. (The camera makes sure of that!)
• If you are shooting in RAW or RAW+JPG mode, the camera will switch to .jpg automatically and then switch back to whatever you had set when you exit Panorama mode.
• Keep the camera close to your body when shooting panoramas. (i.e., it’s best to use the EVF!) The algorithms work best when the axis of rotation is close to the sensor plane.
• Don’t forget to focus-lock on your subject before moving the camera to the left and starting your panorama. (This is especially true if your subject is a different distance from what’s on the left.) The camera won’t try to autofocus nor change its exposure once the panorama shooting has begun.
• Try to avoid shooting panorama pictures under fluorescent light. Such lights are known for their flickering and can produce uneven lighting and varying shot-to-shot color balance as you sweep across your scene.
• Panorama shots come out best when they’re taken under bright light. Low-light can cause all sorts of problems with blurriness and noise.
• When framing your panorama, the camera will likely capture LESS vertical information than what you see in the viewfinder. Why? Sometimes if you’re not perfectly level the distortion correction can get out of hand and the camera will crop the final image so that there’s no dead space, like the yellow rectangle below. So make sure your important subjects are nowhere near the top or bottom of your frame, and stay as level as you can!

 

Figure 6-8: If you’re sloppy about keeping your camera horizontal, the camera will likely capture LESS vertical information than what you see in the rear display. Why? Sometimes if you’re not perfectly level the distortion correction can get out of hand and the camera will crop the final image so that there’s no dead space, like the yellow rectangle above. So make sure that no important subjects are anywhere near the top or bottom of your frame, and stay as level as you can!

 

6.5  (Movie) File Format

Menu Position MENU --> 2 --> File Format

What it Does Lets you specify the video format – XAVC S (4K or HD), AVCHD, or MP4

Recommended Setting If you’re not sure, you can’t go wrong with XAVC S HD.

 

The video file formats and their tradeoffs are discussed pretty thoroughly in Chapter 12 which talks about all things video. Once you read that, you’ll understand why I made the recommendation I did above, and why I chose a specific frame rate and bit rate.