Panoramas Made Easy
One of the hidden charms of digital photography is making panoramic shots. From mountaintop views to vast desert vistas, I've assembled photos as large as six inches high and 104 inches long (at 300 dpi). Making a panorama is surprisingly easy with any midlevel or advanced digital camera. All you need is the ability to lock the camera's exposure values for two or more shots, and an application for stitching the shots into one long photo. I've used ArcSoft's Panorama Maker for about a year with good results, and recently I tried Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 10, which also worked well.
The principle behind making a panorama is simple. Typically, you take a series of overlapping horizontal shots (5 to 10 percent overlap should do). Or, if you want to make a vertical panorama of a very tall subject, overlapping vertically also works. The panorama software finds common points within the overlap and uses them to merge and blend the two shots. Some cameras make this process easy. My Olympus C-5050, for example, has a panorama mode that locks the exposure for the sequence of shots and places framing boxes in the LCD viewfinder to help me match the points of overlap. Models from Canon and Nikon also offer a stitching or panorama-assist mode.
If you are really serious about making a high-quality panorama, you can spend a few hundred dollars on a specialized panorama head, such as the Bogen 303 Panoramic Head. This device goes between the camera and your tripod, and gives you precise stops as you rotate the camera. Carrying a tripod isn't always convenient, however; for my trips into the mountains, I've adapted one of my trekking poles into an ultra-light monopod. But even a monopod may not always be necessary: I've made a perfectly good panorama by carefully handholding my camera. The important steps are to keep the camera on a straight horizontal (or vertical) plane, and to keep the same shutter speed and aperture value for all of the shots you want to combine. Because light values change as you rotate the camera, it's a good idea to take test exposures to find an average setting for the sequence.
Once you've assembled your panorama on your PC, the next step is printing it--which can be disappointing. Only a few of the latest consumer inkjet printers have a panorama-printing mode (or banner mode). Two models that I've looked at limit the length of the print. The HP Photosmart 8450, for example, has a limit of 24 inches for a single print; the Epson Stylus Photo R300 goes up to 44 inches. Panoramas wider or longer than that will require multiple prints that have to be spliced together. Another option is a commercial printer. Two backpacking friends took a nine-inch by eight-foot panorama I created to Kinko's, where it was printed and mounted on a foam backing. Their print cost $100, but they later found out that they should have been charged more. One service I haven't tried is EZ Prints, which charges by the length of the print: $1.25 per six-inch increment for 6-inch-tall panoramas, and $2.25 per six inches for one-foot-tall prints. A one-foot by eight-foot panorama would have cost my friends $36, unmounted.
Tracey Capen
Paul Jasper is a technology consultant and freelance writer in San Francisco; Eric Butterfield is a an associate editor for PC World and writes the column The Print Shop. Tracey Capen is an executive editor, and Dan Littman is a contributing editor, for PC World.
Ad Choices