How to shoot panoramas

Panoramas are a unique, eye-catching style of photography.

They are photos which have a thinner, letterbox shape rather than the normal 4:3 or 16:9 ratio. They are visually very appealing because humans love a horizon, and we love to scan from left to right. The panoramic format is just naturally appealing.

If you have a panorama mode on your camera or phone – use it. It’s by far the simplest and cheapest way to take panoramas. If not, you’ll need to take a series of photos and stitch them together with software. These are the things you need to bear in mind:

1. All manual settings

If you leave your camera on auto, it will adjust the exposure as you pan round and you will end up with dark and light segments in your panorama. To avoid this, choose one exposure setting (ISO, shutter speed and aperture), and put the camera on manual with this setting.

Now put the camera on manual focus, and focus on the mid point of your panorama. Next set the white balance manually so that doesn’t change either as you pan.

Lastly, have an imaginary centre line running through your photo and keep it in roughly the same place. Take your series of photos, preferably in portrait format and with plenty of overlap (not what I did above – landscape and minimal overlap).

2. How to stitch

This photo, above, shows what happens if you tilt the camera a bit as you pan – I ran out of ground in the bottom left and sky in the top right. This will become apparent when you start stitching, and you’ll wish you had held the camera steady and used portrait format not landscape.

The easiest way to stitch is to use Lightroom and Photoshop if you have them. In Lightroom, use Edit In > Merge to panorama in Photoshop. In Photoshop, use File > Automate > photomerge.

PTGui is a well known paid-for stitching only program (currently about $80), and there is also Hugin which is free but not as straightforward to use.

3. Tips for shooting panoramas

1: Change your viewpoint. You can create a “birds eye” panorama like the one above (I used my phone like a scanner across the flower field), and don’t forget you can have vertical panoramas too (great for Pinterest).

2. If you are using an iPhone, did you know that if you tap on the viewfinder in Panorama mode it will switch the direction of the pan?

3. Watch out for movement. People, cars, even the wind blowing the trees will make for weird smudges on a panorama.

4. If you have one, use a longer lens if you will be stitching. Wide angle lenses take photos that are distorted at the edges, and when you add them all together you get an uneven repeated distortion across the whole photo.