AT Play in the Digital Realms: Panorama Photography-Photographing and Merging Panoramic Photos

Gore Range Panorama, Vail Colorado

Time was when you had perhaps three choices for creating a panoramic photo:

1) You could print only a narrow strip of the film or slide. This was okay if you were using a 4x5 or larger camera but 35mm or smaller, forget about it. Make anything larger than perhaps a 10” print and the loss of detail was very apparent. Older film point and shoot cameras gave you a panorama option but all it did was crop the 35mm frame just like above, and show a crop in the viewfinder accordingly.

2) You could also painstakingly merge several exposures in the darkroom. Very difficult.

3) Or, you could use a specialized panoramic camera.

That was then, this is now.

Lots of cameras now will even do it for you. Simply put it in panorama mode, take a few pictures while panning across the scene that capture what you want and the camera will stitch them together. Even the iPhone has a wonderful pano feature; put it in panorama mode and slowly pan across the scene. All the stitching is done automatically. Pretty amazing.

But for high quality panoramas, there’s a bit more involved. And really, it is only a bit but you do have to own some stitching software, some are free, some not.

Here’s a link to Ken Rockwell’s site. He is an excellent on line resource for many things photographic. This is his article on stitching software which explains the software better than I.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/panoramic-software.htm

I don’t know when it was written, but Photoshop’s Merge to Panorama has definitely improved with the past few iterations of PS and it is what I use.

Ideally, you should use a tripod. But it’s not necessary except at night or in dim light. What is most important is that you take your shots from left to right, (the software is designed to work this way), that you overlap each shot by about a third, and that you keep the horizon or you subject level and even across all your exposures.

This is easiest on a tripod where you can level both the tripod and the camera. You can even use a bubble level to level the camera between shots. Vello makes one for $15 that fits in the camera’s flash hot shoe. Now though, some high-end cameras come with a Virtual Horizon function.

Using the Manual exposure setting, adjust your aperture and shutter speed, take a shot of the scene and make sure you have a good exposure by checking your histogram. (More on that in another post.) Once you’re satisfied with the histogram. Take an Auto-focus reading and then turn auto-focus off. You don’t want your camera to focus on something in the foreground in one of your shots and then something in the distance in another.

That being said, there’s no reason you can’t do it on full auto, both exposure and focus. You just have to be aware of the potential auto-focus problems and that your camera’s exposure metering system might see each shot slightly differently giving you varying exposures.

Line up your first, left-hand shot and then practice how you’re going to overlap each shot and keep the subject level in the viewfinder.

Once you’re got it, line up the first shot again and stick one finger in front of the lens and take a picture. This will tell you later that this is the beginning of a pano. Now, take your shots. After the last capture, stick two fingers in front of the lens and take another picture to mark the end of the pano. When you download everything, maybe days or weeks later, you’ll know that the frames between your fingers are for a panorama.

Open these in your stitching software, click Merge or whatever you’re supposed to click and ouila’, a beautiful panoramic photograph.

Here are the four photographs I used to create the Gore Range Panorama Photo plus the photos with my fingers to mark the images to be used. The finished Pano is below as well as at the top of this post.