Making Big Panoramas

Making Big Panoramas

by William Lulow

Panoramas are fun to do and I have been interested in them for quite a while. They give you an all-encompassing view of the world that most single images don’t. It kind of draws you into the place that’s being photographed and almost forces you to stare at it to absorb all the details.

The technique for doing panoramas that can be stitched together with Photoshop, Lightroom or other image-editing software is a fairly straightforward one, but several points should be emphasized:

1. The camera needs to be steadied (most times) with a good tripod
2. The images you use for your AUTOMATED photo-stitch need to overlap a bit. So you need to be aware of what is at the edge of the images you will use
3. The camera needs to be panned along the exact same axis

Here is one example that was stitched from three overlapping images made carefully with the camera mounted on a tripod and just panned on the same axis. Keep in mind that when the final image is created, it will come out as a long, narrow one. You will most likely need to fit it on the longest paper your printer will handle. In this case, I cropped it to 14 inches and the width came out to be a little more than 4 ¼ inches. That’s what a panorama is. Long and narrow.

With this shot, you can almost get a feel for the curvature of the earth!

I made several of these for an exhibit. They were approximately 22” long by 8” wide.

One other point to note is that the images should be shot with near “normal” focal-length lenses. The reason for this is that if the original image encompasses too wide a view, in a panorama, it will begin to distort around the edges. Most of these were created with a 20mm lens on a cropped, digital sensor which actually rendered the images the size they would be if photographed with a 36mm lens on a full-frame DSLR. So, a lens of near normal focal length works best.

Here are some other examples:

When you go about the stitching process, Photoshop will be able to match up elements in two or three images if they contain points common to each image. If the horizon line changes, for example, the program will not be able to correct for that. Hence the need to make sure the camera is on the same horizontal axis. If there is too much change in lighting, the program will not be able to compensate for that. So, you have to begin shooting with the idea that you will be making a panorama.

If you keep all these elements in mind, you should come away with a truly memorable image. One of the other things you will need to keep in mind is that when Photoshop does the stitching of images, there might be some blank space, top or bottom, you will have to crop or retouch. You can buy photographic printing paper for these prints. I made an exhibit of some of mine and printed them myself on 38″ x 13″ paper. I believe the actual printed area itself was 22″ x 8″ as I mentioned above. It worked very well but the paper had to be manually fed into my printer. I’m sure you can get the images printed by a professional lab as well.