My Composite Panorama

(The view from Hoosier Pass on Highway 9 just south of Breckenridge, Colorado)

I have always enjoyed panoramic images. I have never put a lot of effort in to making panoramic images myself as I found that the cameras were a specialized piece of photographic gear that I may only use every-so-often.

However, recently I have seen more and more panoramic images that have been done with standard SLR-type cameras. The photographer shoots a series of images and them puts them together to create a composite panorama in Photoshop.

I have made a composite or two in the past with photoshop, but nothing where there was a complex image involved. I am still very impressed by photographers who make this type of image on a regular basis and can pull it off in such a way that no one is the wiser.

This past Saturday I was on the road taking my two sons to Vail for a youth hockey tournament. The sun was shining, the sky was blue and we were way ahead of schedule, so when I neared the top of Hoosier Pass on Highway 9 I started thinking about getting out and shooting a photo or four.

I drove past two of the pull-offs where people regularly stop to take photos of friends and family with a spectacular background west of the pass. I got to the top of the pass and realized that I needed to turn around and head back to one of the lower spots. My turnaround and drive in the opposite direction was met with questions from the back seat “What are we doing daddy?”.

I just told my boys that I wanted to go back to a spot we had passed to take a photo and that we would still get to the hockey tournament in plenty of time. The response was, “Oh, okay.” It is always good to get permission from your kids before stopping to shoot photos...Ha!

I parked, got out, and at first tried to get the photo that I wanted in one frame. It was okay, but the whole scene wasn’t going to fit into one 28mm frame. I also figured that it wouldn’t look the way I wanted it to if I used my 10.5mm lens. I don’t like to have the trees on the edge of the frame bending over like they are blowing in a hurricane when I am trying to shoot a scenic image.

It occurred to me that I could shoot several images of the scene and when I got home I would drop them into Photoshop and see what I could do to put them together into a decent composite.

I ended up using four images that I shot from left to right of the scene. I overlapped them so as to have a good choice of connection points. I shot the photos at a 320th of a second at f/8 using a film speed rating of 100ASA with my 20-35mm lens zoomed to 28mm.

I still have a lot to learn about doing this, but after spending about 90 minutes playing with the images I was able to come up with an image that did what I wanted it to.

If you have any suggestions on panoramic methods I would love to hear them. In the meantime I will continue to research the technique. Til next time...