Photographing Panoramas

Valley of Views, Tasmania. Epic is an understatement for this place.

One of the defining properties of a great photo is that is captures the true essence of a scene and puts the viewer right in the shoes of the photographer. When you’re presented with a vast landscape, sometimes it can be difficult to portray the world around you using a single frame. In order to capture this essence you need your photo to be a depiction of everything you see, so we need to stretch beyond the bounds of a single photo and create a photograph that conveys the whole world around you.

Panoramic photography is a great way of capturing a vast scene. All it involves is taking multiple sequenced photos of a setting and then stitching them together to create a single, seamless and expansive photograph. In this guide you’ll learn a few tips on photographing panoramas, as well as how to stitch them together using photoshop.

Overlapping your photos.

When it comes to stitching your photos together, the program you’re using will look for matching features in your photos and use them to blend and align the photos together. Because of this, it’s important to have a distinct overlap in the original photos you take. Allow for a 10% to 20% overlap on the sides of your photo.

Don’t clip main features.

If there’s a distinctive object such as a tree in one of your frames, try to include all of it. If you clip half of it off then it’s likely that photoshop will have a hard time aligning and matching the intricate branches of the two photos, and you’ll see a distinct seem where photoshop has tried to put the two photos together. These can be hard to fix, so it’s best to avoid clipping significant features when taking your original photographs.

Photograph in Portrait.

This is probably the best tip I can offer. If you photograph in portrait mode then the extra sky and land in the shots will not only allow you to include more in the end photo, but it will also add another dimension to it. Take a look ‘Valley of Views’ panorama above. This has been created using 5 portrait photographs taken from a central, and if you look at the left and right edges, the photo seems to be wrapping around you. Whilst the effect is still visible when you look at a landscape-shot panorama, this third dimension is amplified by the extra sky and ground in the portrait-shot panorama.

Photographing in portrait will also give you a significantly higher resolution result. The above photo comes to almost 50 megapixels, as opposed to the 20 megapixels that would have been achieved had it been shot in portrait.

Maintain the same exposure and white balance.

Whilst the sun can still produce stunning results in a panoramic photo, its intensity can also corrupt your lighting and exposure between frames. You can quite easily combat this by using either manual mode to maintain the same exposure between shots, or alternatively use the ‘AE-Lock’ feature which will automatically lock the exposure between shots to ensure you end up with a balanced result.

Up, down, left and right.

Don’t constrain yourself to just left and right panoramic images. Experiment and try some up-down ones as well, or maybe combine both of these and produce a grid of photos with ups, downs, lefts and rights. Photographing in this way can be handy when you’re close to your subject, but if you’re distant enough to include the whole scene I’d avoid photographing in a grid and sticking to one direction.

Stitching them together.

There are a number of programs available which allow you to stitch your panoramic photographs together, many of which are free and produce great results. PTgui is probably the free one I’d recommend. Otherwise, Photoshop is perfect for stitching together your panoramic photo. Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Open all your photos in Photoshop
This one’s pretty simple. Just open all the section photos of your panoramic photo in photoshop.

Step 2: Photomerge
Click File > Automate > Photomerge.
This will bring up a new window displaying the options for merging your photos

Step 3: Add open files
Clicking Add open files will of course add all of the photos you have open in photoshop to the photomerge list.

Step 4: Select your Photomerge layout
I tend to leave this on Auto, but there’s always room for experimentation! You should also make sure that ‘Blend images together is selected’

Step 5: Click Ok
And wait for it to load. You should now see your basic panoramic image, similar to the one below. (this image however doesn’t have blending applied)

Step 6: Crop and refine
Just crop out the wobbly edges from your panoramic image and refine any rough edges by blurring them or using the clone stamp tool.

That’s all there is to it. Panoramic photography is a great way to capture the true essence of a scene and can produce some breathtaking results. You don’t need an expensive camera, nor do you need an expensive program. All you need is an eye to capture the world around you, and these tips should help you do that.

Good Luck!

Sky high panoramic photo from Queenstown of New Zealand