You’re at a lookout with your camera. You’ve got your tripod and your wide-angle lens but something is wrong. Everything in your frame looks tiny! You can’t see the beautiful scene before you clear enough. This is what a wide-angle lens is designed to do – to give the feeling of space, to make everything look wiiiiiide. Just like a telephoto lens compresses your subject and background, the wide-angle lens does the opposite.

So… how can you get that wide-angle shot of your scene without your wide-angle lens? One answer is panoramic images. You can use your 50mm (or beyond) to take photographs of sections of your frame, and then later combine them together into one beautiful, wide panoramic image that reaches beyond a 16:9 ratio to something much more wide. The key here is that while you’ve created your wide image, you’re retaining the size of your subject so that you can still see your subject clearly.

Recently I posted about a particularly beautiful Autumn sunrise in Seattle. I’ll deconstruct how I put this particular image together as a panorama in this post along with processing a panorama, and some tips on processes I’ve found helpful so that you too can successfully create your own panoramic images.

The image above is three individual images “stitched” together with software in post-production. At high resolution, it is 7250 x 2054 pixels.

So what’s the best way to create panoramic images? Like most things in photography, there’s definitely more than one way. The way I’m going to describe is how I personally process these kinds of images and is by no means “the best way”, it’s just how I get results I’m personally quite happy with, and in the end that’s what counts. You shouldn’t necessarily adopt my process to the letter – it’s my hope however than in reading through it you find a way that works for you and enables you to also create images that you’re happy to share with the world.

Gear

Other than your camera, the only real piece of gear I recommend is a tripod. Tripods help to keep the height of your images across frames consistent throughout your panorama. There are panoramic tripod heads you can get, but they tend to be pretty expensive. While I don’t find them necessary, they help to make the whole process easier.

Setting Up

It’s crucial to make sure that when you’re setting up to shoot panoramas in the field that you frame every frame in your panorama correctly. Do you have enough room to maneuver around to get all the frames from left to right? You’ll also want to make sure you have that tripod with you to ensure a constant camera height during the process. Ultimately, the easier you can make it for the software to stitch together your images the better your panoramas will be.

While framing your subject, pan across the scene before you to make sure that all of your frames have the content you want in them. It’s sometimes difficult when you set up to keep a point of reference where your shot is going to start and stop, so I tend to shoot a half a frame or extra on each end for a couple of reasons:

1. It gives you a little leeway with your stitching when you reach post-processing;
2. Panoramic software will attempt to correct distortion in the image to give the appearance of a straight line or to raise images up or down to align them. This results in a bevelled or misshapen image where you miss details in the parts of your frame. The extra room allows you to crop off the cruft outside of your subject and retain all of the details in your subject that you want to capture;
3. Sometimes the extra space actually adds to your subject!

Image Orientation – Horizontal or Vertical?

Great panoramas need not be constructed from images with a horizontal orientation; often images with a vertical orientation give great panos! The catch is you’ll need to take more photographs as you pan across your scene. When framing your subject for your panorama – don’t forget to think about a vertical composition!

Capturing Your Images

There are two major points when capturing each individual frame that you’ll ultimately stitch together to remember.

1. Keep your horizon constant throughout all the frames. If you have a pan/tilt head on your tripod, this is easy – don’t tilt, just pan! If you have a ball-head on your tripod, it’s much harder because you have many more degrees of freedom than on the pan tilt-heads. Imagine the horizon as a “straight horizontal line” through your frame and as you pan, imagine in your mind that you’re panning across that line. This will make it much easier for software to stitch together your frames.
2. Isolate your main subjects within the center of your frames. This prevents them from being “stitched”. Sometimes stitching isn’t perfect and it can make your subject look a little ghosty. By keeping the subject in the center of frames, you avoid this problem.
3. When panning across to the next frame, leave some overlap. Stitching software doesn’t work by magically placing frames next to each other and hoping they align. It will actually match features in the images and try to blend them. Leaving about a 5% overlap in your frames will help with stitching.

Post Processing

You can’t put panoramic images together by hand – you need software to help you stitch them together. Some popular programs are PTGui, AutoPano, and yes, even Photoshop has built in support to create panoramic images. I’m not going to tell you how you should post-process to style your image in this post, that’s up to you! I want to call out though that special software is indeed required.

Here’s an image that I’m working on at the moment, it’s straight out of the camera and the stitching process. It’s 3 images, vertically orientated, 50mm focal length. I’ve annotated the rough dimensions of the image and the proposed crop in the image. Clearly there’s too much on the right side of the frame and maybe just enough on the left – this is that “leeway in the image” I was talking about earlier when you capture overlaps and extra portions of your scene. Expect to crop it down. You can also see the grey areas where there isn’t any data. This is left after alignment and stitching – the left frame was a little low as I panned across apparently, but not too much. You can also see some slight distortion correction in the bottom right of frame. This is what you need to account for when shooting your images – they won’t perfectly align and you will lose some of the image when you crop it to a rectangle – be ready for this!

In terms of workflow, this is the first step in the process for me – before any kind of personal style or noise reduction is taken out. Post-processing can add details not present in the original image & make them difficult to stitch. Import your images, and before touching them run them through your stitching software. Import the panorama back into your favourite editing software & have at it!

Cheers to panoramic photographs!

I’ll leave you with a few other panoramas I’ve created recently, along with the final result of this new panorama – thanks for reading!