Have you ever finished shooting a lengthy gigapan and then realized a setting was wrong? I’ll share a few of my mistakes so far in the hope that others can avoid them. If you have some learned wisdom, tell us what to avoid.

- Camera ran out of batteries (duh).
- Forgot to change Epic Pro horizon settings after changing lenses.
- Forgot to manual focus during a night shoot.
- Forgot to turn off auto white balance when shooting JPGs.
- Shot too close to sunset. Sun went down and half of 338 photos were black.

Above all, shoot in RAW and allow enough time to double check your settings.

What are you thoughts?

http://gigapan.com/gigapans/24538
I learned I have to turn OFF image stabilization to avoid shake on the top image.

Bring multiple battery trays. Nothing will ruin your day faster than dropping your only tray when swapping batteries and watching it shatter on the ground or fall over a cliff (I’ve seen both – I now carry 4!)

Purchase a good charger tha allows you to test and condition your batteries.

I understand turning off image stabilization, but are there times when it would help with a longer lens if there is a little bit of wind?

That’s a good question. Only way to find out is to run the experiment sometime, I suspect.

So what does turning off image stabilization do?

Mistakes:
- Forgetting to turn off auto focus
- Not writing down number of images/columns (makes it hard to stitch 1000 images when a few in the middle are missing)
- Not paying attention and fixing it when the gigapan misses image halfwya through a 1000 image pano.
- Not eyeballing the horizon well enough and cutting off some crucial part of the image (http://gigapan.com/gigapans/106048)
- Not blocking the viewfinder so the image exposure is way off (see the black parts in the bottom left side of this one: http://gigapan.com/gigapans/104747)
- Trying to set overlap too low to reduce image count and ruining a huge image: http://gigapan.com/gigapans/88326 -although the new stitcher mostly fixed this image… http://gigapan.com/gigapans/101140)
- Driving 5 hours to southern Utah without the camera trigger cable for my epic pro.
- Leaving the trigger cable in the epic pro so I won’t forget it and bending it so it’s unusable.
- Forgetting the camera mount for clipping my camera into the epic pro
- Tripod in the snow and the legs are missing their rubber tips so one of the legs sinks in by the end of the pano and the tripod is on a total slant.
- Leaving the shoulder strap on the camera so it hooks on the tripod as the gigapan turns
- Bumping an epic 100 halfway through a huge pano so the whole head rotates way out of sync
- Camelback opens in the pack and fills both cameras with water (this was my friend who was I loaned my rig to so he could shoot a pano for me)

I could go on all day ;) The best solution is to just shoot tons of them so when you are shooting one that you really want to come out you’ll remember to do everything right.

Oh man, Tim you really figured it out the hard way but your mention of blocking the viewfinder is a great tip.

Older Canon lenses with Image Stabilization don’t know what to do when sitting extremely still, such as being mounted on a tripod. The IS tries to correct shake that isn’t there, and actually ends up creating vibration by itself.