NOTES

I can't recall the precise moment I decided to do panoramic photos, but it may have had its genesis in a framed photo of my husband's that he took in pre-digital days. Shot near Mt Everest's base camp, this stunning self-portrait was constructed of a dozen or more photos morticed together like puzzle pieces to form a panoramic Himalayan vista. I remember thinking what a great job I could do of scanning those images and tiling them together in Photoshop.

That project never came to fruition (I was concerned about damaging the individual photos if I pulled them apart), but as I grew increasingly more facile with digital photography, panoramas were a natural outgrowth of my skills and experience. In 2002 I bought an Olympus C-2100 UZ, which had a panoramic function, and I was off... it enabled me to lock in exposure and white balance to take increasingly sophisticated panoramic photos.

My favorite panoramas have been taken in the Marin Headlands north of San Francisco, and in Montana and Alberta, Canada. The first image in this gallery - a sepia-toned panorama of Chief Mountain in Alberta, Canada, is one of my favorites. The panorama is the perfect way to depict that landscape's rolling prairies and boundless skies. The round hay bales were strewn like fallen chess pieces across the landscape, and Chief Mountain was an amazing focal point.

On the second page of this gallery, the top photo is another of my favorites: a panoramic vista shot from the north side of the lake, on the road from Bodie.

TIPS

Overlap
You just can't have too much overlap between frames. I recommend at least 25%. The more overlap you have, the more real estate you have available to blend in each frame to the next. Keep in mind that if you use software to stitch, the overlap areas are more prone to ghosting...but apps like Panorama Factory let you control the amount of overlap.

Exposure
The trickiest aspect of successful panoramic photography is getting the exposure right. Since you need to have the same exposure and white balance across all frames (so that each photo blends seamlessly into the next), you should select your subjects (or the time of day you're shooting) carefully. If you choose a vista with huge differences in light readings between the lightest and the darkest frames, it will be challenging to produce a successful panorama (or will require significant post-processing work). Once you decide what you're going to shoot, you need to select your exposure based on an "average" lighting point in the frame. Don't choose the brightest area or the darkest area for metering. If you choose the brightest area, the darkest areas will be hopelessly underexposed. Conversely, metering on a dark area will result in the bright areas being too washed out.

Level Horizon
Keep level with the horizon as you shoot, and don't shoot too tight --- you may need extra sky or ground in post-production when you level the horizon of your shot.

Use tripod
A standard tripod can be tricky to use when taking a pano --- it's not always going to maintain a level horizon --- but in low light shots, you should really consider using one ... because it's a shame to take a breathtaking pano to discover one blurred frame that renders the entire pano unusable. When using a tripod, carefully look at each shot before you click the shutter to maintain a level horizon line, and adjust as necessary. If you're serious about panoramic photography, consider a three-way head with a spirit level. If you're insanely serious about panoramic photography, check out the Philopod.

Not using a tripod?
As you rotate the camera around, rotate around as if it were on a tripod, moving the camera around a central point through the vertical axis of the camera rather than moving the camera around in a circle.

Master Masking
Learning to mask in Photoshop is an invaluable skill when it comes to producing high quality panos. It allows you to blend in the seams, well, seamlessly. Unlike erasing, masking allows you to undo/redo your work as many times as necessary by switching between a black and a white brush -- the first which masks (covers) the image; the second which uncovers the masked image to "undo" the mask. By controlling opacity, you can control how much of the underlying layers show through. Click here to learn more about masking techniques.

Get a Graphics Tablet
Two compelling reasons for investing in a graphics tablet: ergonomics and control. It's hard to be precise with a mouse, and hours of mouse usage can reduce your hand to a curled up, unusable claw (think Poe's "Monkey's Paw"). A graphics tablet lets you use a pen, and with the pen you get pixel-perfect control, which makes a huge difference when trying to blend edges of a panorama. Intuos' Graphire4 tablet is a reasonably-priced tablet --- and once you own one, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it!

Software
I prefer stitching my panos manually, but it's much easier for a novice to use software for the stitching. Also, some of the more sophisticated panorama software corrects for barrel distortion and offers features that are not so easy to accomplish manually. So why go manual? I think the end product is better. I rarely complete a software-stitched pano without discovering ghosting in at least a couple areas of the image. What's ghosting? It's a faint repeating of an element in the image caused by the software trying to match up shapes between frames. Usually, when you take the source shots, you will tilt the camera ever so slightly from frame to frame, causing a small difference in the angle it captures. The shape (say, of a tree or the side of a house) will not be absolutely identical between Frame A and Frame B, and that combined with barrel distortion will make it hard for the software to match the shapes perfectly. Stitching the pano manually allows you to erase any potential ghosting... but it also takes a lot of time. Often, if I've got a pano I think will stitch well together with software, I give the software a try first... then do it manually if intervention is needed. The difference in time is significant. The software solution takes a minute or two. Manual stitching can take hours.

Here are a few types of panoramic software: