I now have my XSI. MrotatorUT, Manfrotto 190xprob and rc486 head. I was interested to know what camera settings recommendations I should start out with. I have this weekend to figure it out, then next week I have to do a couple of shoots.

I have to do a car dealership with some mirrors and a lot of glass windows, then a vetnary facility that has very little natural light and is all florescent tube lights.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

I will offer you some pointers but shooting panoramas of quality require more skill than you will know within a couple of weeks. Still, you should be able to get some reasonable results.

Things you need to do:

• Find your No Parallax Point (NPP)
• Set camera to (M) manual mode
• Set aperture to f/8.0
• Set ISO to 100
• Set White Balance to match the scene (Daylight, Shady, Fluro etc)
• Meter the scene and find the "average" light and set your shutter speed based on the internal light meter. The center position is correct and looks a little like this in your view finder of LCD display. -2ev|--|--|+2ev
• Set lens to (MF) manual focus
• Find your Hyperfocal distance and set the focus to optimize this. If this is beyond you start with somewhere just short of the infinity marking on the lens.
• Level your panohead at the number one 0 degree position.
• Shoot position 1 and then rotate to position 2, 3 , 4 and if you are shooting a zenith shot and stitching with Panoweaver your should rotate +90 degrees whilst in position 4 and shoot. (and Nadir -90 if required).

Never use any "Auto" modes.

Shoot RAW format. If you don't have a RAW workflow and understanding still shoot RAW but also enable +jpg fine that way you will get the RAW image and a fine .jpg image.

Follow these instructions and you should be good to go. If all else fails at least you will have a set of RAW files I can look at and maybe correct to save the project.

Good luck and remember I offer "One on One" live paid professional tuition on all aspects of panorama making from buying, shooting, stitching, correcting and display.

Regards, Smooth

Thank-you very much. I have had some tuition from a friend in Canada, however he was using a coolpix 5000, so was not sure how much difference I should expect.

Off to practice!!