I try to be prudent when it comes to employing special effects or using exotic wide angle lenses. They are fun and accomplish some cool results. When used too often though, they become cliche and sometimes can even defeat the original purpose of using the effect or lens which would be to make the photo better. (please see more text and second photo)

Thanks in large part to easy-to use-iPhone apps, panorama photos are becoming more commonplace. Up until about a year ago, the extent of my panorama experience was exactly that, shooting them with iPhones and point and shoots. Then I began to work for a client that asks that I shoot panoramas on every job. The more panoramas I shoot with my DSLRs the more I enjoy it. I find myself supplementing my regular images with panoramas all the time. In many cases using this approach really helps as shown in an earlier post about photographing a group photo with more than 400 people in it.

I shot the panorama above of a pedestrian bridge that connects two buildings in busy downtown Bethesda, Md., near Washington D.C. The version below is a non-pan photo taken with a wide angle zoom at about a 28mm focal length. For me the panorama gives the viewer a better feel of the environment surrounding this bridge that the one frame photo does not, albeit with some distortion.

I could have stepped further back with a fisheye lens but then the buildings would be so far apart it would not look real. The panorama consisted of 6 vertical shots using a 28mm focal length. It was easily pieced together using the photomerge function under automate in Adobe Photoshop. When shooting panoramas it is best to shoot the different sections vertically. Be sure to leave a little overlap on each frame so the photos will merge gracefully.

Thanks for visiting my blog today. Hope to see you tomorrow. Rob