I’ve been experimenting with shooting panorama landscapes lately. Essentially, that requires photographing the scene as a number of horizontal frames and then stitching them together in Photoshop. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. As with anything, the more you practice, the more you learn what kinds of shots works well in this format, and over time, you become more efficient with your panorama workflow.
Here are some of my recent panorama images. Click on an image, and then click again in the new page to see the full size version of the shot.
Nice pictures! Do you use any special equipment to take these, like the pano heads from RRS? I have tried taking panos and merging them in photoshop, but I usually get this weird curvature to my panos when I try to merge more than two photos.
Thanks for your comments! At this point, I don’t use any special equipment. As I said, I’m new to shooting panoramas and am quickly learning. All of these shots above are handheld, but I can see how a tripod and pano head would help, especially when using wide angle lenses. With the wider lenses, you can run into linear distortion problems if the lens isn’t perfectly level, and if you include alot of foreground or if you don’t rotate the camera on a consistent axis, perspective distortion will give you curved horizons across multiple frames and unworkable pano images.
Sometimes Photoshop is able to successfully merge these kinds of shots, as with my middle row left image, that has a very curved horizon. However, I’ve had many that didn’t end up working. Sometimes by trying again at a different resolution and image size, for some reason, PS ends up being able to stitch the shot successfully. Keep trying!