I recently had a chance to read through Harald Woeste’s book Mastering Digital Panoramic Photography ($34.95).  I found the book to be a good primer on panoramic photography techniques.  It covers the photographic equipment you’ll need, a section on software, and an interesting set of real world example projects at the end of the book.

If you are new to the world of panoramic photographer the first chapters are a nice introduction to the tools and techniques you will need to understand to capture images that can be later stitched into panoramas.  Most useful was a section outlining some of the VR panoramic tripod heads that are currently available on the market.  I found the brief summary of each model with pros and cons valuable and had wished I had read the book before I had purchased a VR panoramic head myself.

Later in the book Woeste discusses image stitching and the various software packages that are available.  Again he talks about the pros and cons but does not go into step-by-step instructions.  If you are looking for hand holding through the stitching process this is not the book for you.  While the book gives some good information you’ll be better off downloading some of the trial versions of the software mentioned in the book and experimenting with the software packages yourself.

One of the more interesting components of the book were the final four chapters.  Each chapter gives  a play-by-play account of one of four of his real world projects to create  panoramic image.  He discusses some the challenges presented by the locations and the tools and techniques discussed previously in the book that he used to overcome those challenges.

The book is well written although I think the stitching chapter assumes you have a basic knowledge of some of the terms used by software stitching.  As with other books by publisher Rocky Nook I found the example photographs and illustrations were well done and added value to the descriptions in the writing.  If you are just getting started in the world of panoramic photography this is a good book to add to your shelf.