A stitch in time...

The bigger picture: Sometimes photographers like to squeeze as much of a scene into the frame as possible. That used to entail either fitting a wide-angle lens, or taking a few steps back. The real problem doing so was that certain aspects of the image would be correspondingly smaller as a result; not always desirable. A bigger print would need to be made to compensate, and then lens faults and film grain/digital sensor limitations - with their finite arrays - began to play a part in degrading the image.

There is a better option in the digital age, and that is to shoot a panoramic. Panoramic cameras have been around for a very long time - who doesn't recall seeing those stretched-out school photos? However, these cameras were often unwieldy and expensive, but your common or garden camera need not be, yet still achieve quality results.

I hadn't planned to shot using this technique this afternoon - it was more of a spur of the moment thing - so there is a degree of distortion evident in the shot, and the horizon is somewhat bent, but for what it is I am prepared to overlook it this time.

I was using a standard zoom lens but still wanted more than it could deliver, so panoramic it was to be, purely just for fun. First, I set the camera's autofocus and metering systems to manual mode, and set picture quality to 'fine jpeg': I usually shoot RAW files, but this would have resulted in an unnecessarily massive file to work with on the computer. Next, I took a general meter reading from the brightest part of the scene; selected the aperture and focused roughly a third of the way in. I touched nothing after that. Turning the camera to the portrait mode (upright), I took a series of photographs, panning from left to right, allowing an overlap of roughly a third of the frame from one shot to the next. This gives the software the information it needs to automatically align the eleven shots for a smooth transition. Adobe Photoshop did the rest.

Despite the rough-and-ready approach I was rather pleased with the outcome, and made the mental note that this is a technique I should employ more often. The resulting 39.55 MB file will produce a print 86 cm wide in its native format.


24-70mm f/2.8G AF-S Nikkor. All eleven frames: 1/250 second at f/10. ISO 400. Stitched together in Adobe Photoshop


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