Are you tired of being limited by the constraints of the standard aspect ratio your camera provides? Are you looking for something to get your creative juices flowing? Making panoramas may be the solution to your woes. What was once an involved process is now easily achievable. Many image editing programs have stitching programs built in and if not, those solely dedicated to making panoramas are inexpensive and easy to use.

There are a number of benefits to making panoramas. Stitching multiple files together nets a final image comprised of many pixels. The resulting image can be blown up to huge print sizes and maintain detail throughout. If you use a DX sized sensor and need to create large files, capture the scene as a panorama. The final photo will have more pixels than if you captured the scene using a camera with a full sized sensor. Another benefit is some subjects simply cry out to be captured with an aspect ratio suitable for a panorama. Anytime you view a scene that doesn’t conform to conventional aspect ratios, make a series of images and stitch them together. A third benefit is it gets you to think outside the box as you begin to look for images in a new and fresh way. So while you’re in the field, think panorama to reinvigorate your creative juices.  

To stitch a great pano, many factors need to be pondered. It’s these factors I want to address in this article. With regards to the software side, in that every program is different, the How To aspect of this can be found in one of my Photoshop Tips of the Month on the Take Great Pictures website. The link to it is at the end of this article.

Use Manual Exposure: as you pan the camera from left to right or top to bottom, it’s quite probable that the exposures will vary from one capture to the next. This is especially true if there are shadows or silhouettes and bright specular highlights scattered throughout the scene. This being the case, meter the portion with the brightest highlights in manual mode and use this as your base exposure for all the other files to stitch together. 

White Balance: use a camera preset such as cloudy, daylight, etc. or set the color temperature manually. This will ensure that all files have the same color balance. While Auto does a good job, slight variations will be quite obvious in the stitched version.

Remove the Polarizer: a polarizer darkens a blue sky to its maximum when aimed 90 degrees from the sun. As you deviate from this point, the effect is lessened. Depending on how much of the sky is included, if you leave a polarizer on the lens, it will create sky blending nightmares on adjacent sky portions of the pano.

Don’t Go Super Wide: use a lens with a focal length of at least 35mm to prevent wide angle distortion. 

Level the Camera and Tripod: if you’re forced to handhold the camera, make sure the software you use can handle the variations that are guaranteed to occur. If you get super serious about creating panoramas, specially designed heads are made that use what’s called the nodal point to guarantee a smooth blending of images.

Avoid Scenes Where Objects Are Moving: the software that’s available today performs quite admirably, but it can’t blend overlapping pieces of one section where subject A exists if it doesn’t exist in the adjacent section.  

Be Consistent: use the same aperture to capture all pieces of the pano. Be sure the focus point is set to a spot where the depth of field remains the same in all the files. Use a cable release - if one piece of the pano is soft, the image is ruined. 

Overlap: overlap the adjacent images by at least 30 percent. Some photographers go as much as 50 percent. Anything less than 30 and you begin to tax the demands of the software to produce a smooth blending of the images.

Avoid Strong Foregrounds: foreground objects will take on extreme distortion when incorporated into a panorama. It’s better to avoid them.

Vertical vs Horizontal Capture: While it’s not uncommon to use horizontal captures to piece together a pano, it’s better to use more vertical captures as it provides more head and foot room from which to crop. They also provide less distortion. On the other hand, if the resulting image is to be a long vertical, use a horizontal format to capture the pieces that will constitute the vertical image. 

See the Photoshop Panorama Tutorial: How to stitch together captured files to make a Panorama picture

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