Why I Have So Much Trouble With Panoramic Photos
Panoramic photo of Great Ocean Road seascape made with Hasselblad X-PAN II.
I have a monkey on my back when it comes to making digital panoramic photos. It's a monkey that's particularly pesky and I need to get it off of me.
Cleary this viewpoint is creatively limiting and I need to do something about it. The best way I can free myself of that free riding passenger is to change my outlook on making panoramic photos with a digital camera.
But where did my negative opinion on panoramic photos begin
The Heart Of The Problem
Back in the day I had a whole lot of fun making panoramic photos with an analog Hasselblad X-PAN and X-PAN II cameras. I loved those cameras, particularly with the 30 mm lens attached.
The above photo is a good example of the kind of panoramic photos I used to make. The image was made, at dusk, of a seascape along Australia’s Great Ocean Road.
The image was a favorite of mine as it explores the duality of solidity and fluidity. And the notion of duality is one of the main themes in the photos I create.
Composition is very important to me so, as a consequence, I almost never need to crop my images. That's simply because I take time to get it right in camera.
When it came to making photographs with the film-based Hasselblad X-PAN cameras I used a tripod almost all of the time.
And that's despite the fact that the X-PAN was, by the standards of the day, a relatively lightweight and ergonomic camera.
My Strength Prevents Me From Succeeding
Strangely, I've done almost no panoramic photography since moving to digital back in 2006. It's crazy, but it's largely because I hate the common practice of making a series of images and then stitching them together.
Why? Because I really love to get my composition right in camera.
Frankly the idea of assembling a panoramic image, from a series of individual exposures made on a conventional digital camera with a 3:2 ratio, seems silly.
Panoramic photos of a bridge at the wonderful Snow World, Harbin, China.
I Know It Makes Sense And That I Have To Adapt
However, the reality is that, until a reasonably priced digital panoramic camera system arrives on the market, stitching is usually a very good option that should not be discouraged.
Putting aside the joy of constructing a great photo composition in camera it’s undeniable that, by combining a series of individual images into one very large file, you end up with an image that has the capacity to be enlarged significantly.
If your computer can cope with a file of that size you now have the ability to make huge prints, assuming that's important to you.
But the other key difference associated with photo stitching is that, rather than employing a wide-angle lens to fit a lot of information into the frame, you have the opportunity to use a telephoto lens for each of the individual frames that will be stitched together to make the new composite image.
The advantage of this method is that the new composite image will display more fine details than would be the case with a single image made, often from a distance, with a wide-angle lens.
What's more the composite panoramic photo you create is far less likely to display the kind of distortion evident on the edges of the scene that appears with images made with a wide-angle lens.
Panoramic photo of red decorations and lantern on Huangshan Mountain, China.
Cropping Is A Simple Solution That Works
Even though I haven't used any kind of digital stitching over the years to assemble a panoramic image I've felt the need, from time to time, to crop an image made on a standard ratio DSLR or Mirrorless camera into the panoramic format.
I'm usually aware of the need to do so while I'm composing the image, in camera, so it's a very simple process to crop it later on the desktop.
Cropping may not be the most eloquent or the most technically acceptable approach, as you lose pixels in the process, but it works and is probably the best way for many amateur photographers to begin exploring the power of the panoramic format.
For example, both images from Huangshan Mountain (i.e., Yellow Mountain) in China were made with a Canon 5D Mark II camera and Canon 24-105mm f/4 lens and were cropped into the panoramic format on the desktop.
The Best Way To Solve A Problem Is Through Action
I hope this post has been as helpful to you as it has been to me.
In my case I've decided to set myself a task of getting out and about and making a series of images with my Sony A1 camera and a special rig I bought years ago, and never used, that's designed for digital panoramic photography.
I'II be sure to post some of those images and, who knows, the effort to overcome this creative block may see me making a lot more panoramic photos in the future.
