Pixiq

How do you compose a stitched panorama?

Answer: most people don’t.

One of the great inventions of digital photography is stitching. Swing the camera, shoot overlapping frames, load into Photoshop’s Photomerge, Stitcher, et al. New technologies like Sony's CyberShot even do it in-camera. You get a a panorama that’s bigger, wider than the camera was made for. No pain, all gain. Excellent. Except...

Shooting means composing, and as we all know, how you frame the shot makes the difference. What’s in the frame, what’s left out, and how it’s all organised in what Cartier-Bresson called "the geometry of the image" is the core skill of photography. But neither the viewfinder nor the screen give you this wider view — how could they? — so how can you frame a panorama that you’re actually building up by adding sideways to the picture? 

To a few people it comes naturally, intuitively. You look at the scene and crop it in the mind’s eye. Raise the camera, adjust the zoom at the left edge of your imagined view, and start panning right, squeezing off shots that overlap (50% overlap, incidentally, to be safe and sure). But perhaps more typically what happens is that you find a place to begin — on the left, say — and then keep panning right and shooting until you run out of interest. Leave the framing until later, in post-production. That’s perfectly workable, but it’s not exactly the photographer in control of the shot.

A little help wouldn’t go amiss. If the shot’s important, it’s worth taking a little time to prepare. Think classic landscape photography, think Ansel Adams. This was never point-and-shoot, more a deliberate set-up. So, at the very least, if it helps, you could do this...

Or you could go a step further and use a handheld frame. Yes, I know this is getting really old-fashioned, but what’s wrong with that? Here’s something I re-purposed from my view camera, now sadly languishing with no duties to perform in these digital days...

Again, no rocket science, but a dead simple way to preview a panorama before shooting. And more importantly, a starting point for making a panorama composition. What’s interesting here is that the longer, wider, thinner frame shape acts on the image in a different way from the ‘fatter’ 3:2 and 4:3 frames that most of us are used to. The frame shape creates a strong side-to-side direction, whatever you put inside it. Naturally, panoramas work well on landscapes that have a strong horizontal element, so overlooks, rolling horizons and clear foregrounds are a good start. This is the most obvious use of a panorama (though by no means the only one, as we’ll see).

That sounds simple enough, but composition can still help. One basic is that it’s good to have ‘stops’ at the ends, left and right, rather than letting it just drift off aimlessly at one or both sides. Here’s an example.

And for occasions when there are no convenient end ‘stops’, look for an element that will ‘key’ the composition. Even without strong physical features in the landscape, lighting can play a strong part — particularly in the wide sweep of a panorama that is more likely to have patches of light and cloud shadows than a tighter, more normal view. Where to position it in the frame? There are no rules, obviously, and certainly no ‘rule of thirds’, but off-centering in a panorama makes very good use of the frame’s built-in side-to-side sense....

But this is just a start. Wide panoramic frames can be used in very different ways, some unexpected. Subject-background shots can be strong and unusual. I’ll look at these in a future post, but here’s a taster...

Or you could also do this...