A panoramic image in digital photography is a wide, sweeping compound-image made by digitally splicing together multiple, smaller, images.
Since they’re many pictures panoramic images make it possible to capture a breathtaking amount of detail and make absurdly large prints using the merged image.
A panorama usually has a highly rectangular aspect-ratio, with the horizontal side overwhelmingly exceeding the height, by 2:1 or more.
Whenever you’re in a space where you do not have a lens of a wide enough angle of view, or you’re simply beholding a scene whose grandeur simply cannot be reduced to one frame, a panorama is what you make to preserve it in all its glory.
It’s easy enough to make a panorama with a mobile device camera these days, but with DSLRs, it’s still a manual process, involving a few critical must-dos. Here are a few.
How to make a panorama using a DSLR?
Making a panorama with a DSLR is fairly easy if you follow these guidelines.
- Allow sufficient overlap between pictures (we recommend at least 60% overlap for maximum accuracy and seamlessness.
- Switch to manual exposure to prevent variation in brightness.
- Turn off autofocus (you don’t want different parts of the panorama focused at different distances).
- Be as smooth as possible while panning (use a tripod for best results).
- Shoot vertical frames to max out on resolution.
- Avoid using an ultra-wide-angle lens.
Once done with the fieldwork, now all that remains to be done is to use a processing application such as Adobe Lightroom to merge the pictures into one hopefully seamless image like this:
To stitch the images automatically in Lightroom, simply choose the individual frames in the thumbnail view, right click, hover over ‘Photo Merge’ and choose Panorama.
Also, remember to process the single panorama file after the merging and not bother processing the individual pictures before stitching.
Interested in improving your skills?
Imparting photography knowledge that eventually increases our attention and love for various details of life on this planet is at the heart of everything we do at Toehold. If you are a photography enthusiast and are interested in learning photography methodically from our ace photographers, explore our Photography Workshops and other related courses at Toehold Academy, or if you want to harness your skills and get mentored by our team of extraordinary photographers on the field, in real-time on our Photography Tours to destinations across India and abroad, explore our Photography Travel offerings.
