Fun With Panoramas

I shot the photo above at a Washington Nationals game a few years back. It is a panorama shot with Canon PowerShot from the first row of Section 203 at Nationals Park. I have been taking a lot of panoramas lately and have been having a good time doing so! Please see more text and panoramas below. (To see each of these photos in their true wide panorama form, please click on each image.)

Panoramas provide a different perspective on scenes. They also can give a much clearer and definitive view of bigger buildings such as Lake Brittle (above) a sports stadium or the U.S. Capitol shown below.

When shooting panoramas you always want to be working in a vertical format so you have plenty of space to work with on the tops and bottoms of your final product. Typically I shoot my panoramas using 6-12 frames. Remember you always want to overlap your frames when shooting a panorama so there will be a smooth transition in post processing.

With Adobe Photoshop stitching panoramas is a cinch. All you need to do is go to file-automate-photo merge and choose your files and Photoshop pretty much does the rest.

For more accurate composition, it is recommended you use a tripod.

I usually try to use a wider angle lens but am beginning to experiment with telephotos when shooting panoramas. The longer lens you use the further away you will probably have to be from your subject to get enough space on top and on the bottom to have an effective panorama.
The composition is also much more critical when shooting panoramas with longer glass.

The closer you get to a scene or building with a wide angle lens the more distortion you will end up with, as seen in the Hylton Performing Arts Center shot above or the Lincoln Memorial photo at the bottom of the post.

Newer iPhones include built in panorama apps and you can also download several panorama type apps for iPhones.

Whichever camera or post processing method you have, have fun with it! You can end up with some spectacular detail (as shown in the Fort Hunt Hight School Reunion photo) that you would almost never see using a non-panorama approach on a large scene.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog today. Rob