Panoramas

Panoramas are one of those wonderful things that we can do in digital that were previously just not possible without expensive and specialized equipment. It opens up tremendous possibilities.

This is an image taken just outside the town of Ronda, Spain. The tall bridge spanning the gorge, the cliffs, the waterfall… it’s just striking. This is a stitching together of three shots, and it was done hand held. With a film SLR you would have to use an extreme wide angle, introducing distortion, and then crop out the excess sky and foreground, resulting in a small useable film area, and less enlargement potential. With the stitching, you have effectively more than twice the pixels that the camera can make in a single shot. It can be printed to almost any size.

The key to successful panoramas is to keep the camera level. If there’s a clear horizon, that’s usually not much of a problem. It’s a good idea to turn on some kind of grid in your viewfinder to use as a reference. In a case like this one, where there is no visible horizon, just give it your best estimate and do several. One will be better than the others.  

I’m making this sound easy but it’s really an incredible feat that is performed by the various photo editing programs. They really do amazing things when photo stitching. But they’re not perfect. If the camera is not level or the individual shots are not given enough overlap, the final composite can be grossly distorted from a rectangle. You may have to do some perspective correction or cropping. I’ve found that you can reduce cropping by simple cloning. Imagine, in this shot, that the crop includes the building on top of the cliff on the right but also, the distortion has produced a white area of no pixels in the upper left. If you crop the top of the picture to eliminate the white area, you’ll lose the buildings on the other side. In many cases, you can clone in the missing sky and still get the composition you want. Photoshop’s “Content Aware Fill” is really good at this.There are many shooting and editing techniques involved in a successful panorama. Way too many to go into here. They’re really worth investigating on your own. There are also several online courses available. Personally, I like lynda.com

Panoramas really expand your toolbox and are one of the few techniques that actually give you more in terms of a larger file size than your camera can really produce. I think that this ability will really give you a better “eye” when evaluating the limitless possibilities of landscape photography.

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