Panoramic photography can give a spectacular view of a scene. It can obviously show more of the scene, but I also find the wide format very satisfying to look at. This article is a simple guide to creating panoramic images, with references to more advanced tutorials. It also features some of my photos.

There are many ways of creating panoramic photographs. There are special cameras, some with a fixed wide lens, but also rotating cameras existGoogle search for Panoramic camera. This equipment is quite expensive, and not suitable for most people. Many modern digital cameras can actually take panoramic photographs with special functions. These allow two or three photos to be taken and automatically stitched together into a wide photograph. In my experience the results can be acceptable, but not impressive. There are software that can produce significantly better results, using any number of photos as material. So you can take photos with your camera, load then into the software and get a nice result out. I created the piece below from 5 photos, and stitched them together. It shows Ålesund.

I think the method I used gives a good result, with a minimal amount of equipment and software. What you need is a digital camera of some sort, any kind will do. A way of transferring the photos to a computer, and a panoramic imaging software. The software we are going to use is open-source, and can be easily downloaded and installed from the hugin website.

hugin - Panorama photo stitcher

The hugin project started around 2003, and is today a well known and popular software. A description reads hugin on Wikipedia:

hugin is a cross-platform open source panorama photo stitching and HDR merging program. Stitching is accomplished by using several overlapping photos taken from the same location, and using control points to align and transform the photos so that they can be blended together to form a larger image.

While hugin has an easy assisted creation process, it is an advanced program, and further reading is advised. Especially the tutorial section can be well worth a visithugin tutorials.

An example

I dug out some old photos from a camping trip this summer. I remember taking some photos meant as a panorama, but that they did not come out good, and I never made it. Well, now it's time to do it. The four initial photos can be seen to the right. When taking photos for a panorama there are some things that are very important to think about. The photos must overlap about 20% on each side that will be stitched. It is better to take one more photograph, than to have a too small overlap. The biggest problem is that your camera will adjust its brightness after the light in the scene, and when you move the camera to take another picture, both focus and brightness will change. This will make the panorama look weird. You need to activate a function called auto-exposure lock, or AEL. On Canon cameras it is often marked with a star-like symbol. If your camera does not have this function, you can attempt another trick. Hold the button half-way in to focus, when you take the picture release the button only a little. Now you can take another picture with the exact same settings.

Notice that the images that I want to stitch overlap a little, so that the software can figure out where they are the same. I'm not going into detail about installing the program, and not really so much about using it either. It does not take many steps to create a simple panoramic, but you can do it very advanced if you want to. After I load my photos, I click Align and the software figures out how the photos are connected. I can now control that everything is to my liking, and make changes if I see that it's necessary. The program usually get close, but I often have to make small corrections.

At the end you press Create panorama and the software saves the final image. You probably want to do some post-processing on it, such as cropping the black areas. I like to change the white balance a little, change the levels and usually add a black border. I recommend gimpGimp for that.

The result

That is all there is to it. As I said before, I never really liked this photo, so I'm not surprised that it didn't come out great. The light was wrong, and there was too little colors in the mid-range. But at least you could follow the simple process of making it with me. For further, and more advanced reading, about creating panoramic photographs I recommend this tutorialhugin - stitch photos.

Trondheim panorama

This panorama is taken from Utsikten in Byåsen. It has a great view of Trondheim, on a very nice day. I remember it was very hot, and I had my camera and a tripod with me. The panorama is made with the method described above. I think it was 5 or 6 photos (portrait).