Panoramas

The iPhone has a very easy to use facility for taking Panorama images: hold down the shutter button and rotate camera from left to right with an onscreen indicator to help you keep it level as you swivel from the hips.

It is not so easy with a Digital SLR (or mirrorless) camera requiring a sturdy support and some clever software manipulation.   When I first tried this many years ago the software was specialist, expensive and difficult to use; I did not progress beyond the free software trial.  Things have changed the software is built into Lightroom Classic (which I have) and is largely automatic.

Looking out of my balcony on Sunday just before sunset I was sent running for my camera by this mix of storm clouds, red sky, and smoke like trails as clouds were rising.  No time to set up a tripod as the light was fading rapidly, so I wondered what I could achieve hand held.

The above image is made of of 30 overlapping portrait aspect photos taken from left to right.  I took a test shot using automatic focus, auto ISO and, aperture control set at f22 (to maximise DoF) to establish the camera settings, 1/50 sec and ISO 6400.  Then putting the camera to manual with those settings and switching off auto focus to preventing any change as I moved the camera from left to right.

I then recomposed and started taking images overlapping about 1/3rd of the frame each time:

Then it was a simple matter to import the photos from camera to Lightroom, select them all and the menu item "Photo Merge Panorama" before making coffee, drinking it and walking the dog before returning to see the results and being pleasantly surprised,  The software does a good job aligning images and crops out the rough edges where the camera has moved up or down.  The final result is a very large (835 MB) RAW file (DNG format).  This would print quite nicely at about 9 meters wide!  Wallpaper anybody.  This is a much larger file than any that the iPhone can create.  There is some grain in the image, as I would expect at that ISO level, but it is not too intrusive.

Stitching Software (Free)

I am conscious that I am the only one amongst us with Lightroom Classic software so did a quick search to see if there was a free alternative.  My own, free Canon Digital Photo Professional, application has the capability built in but I also found several third party applications including one free open source package: 

Hugin.  I have not tried it but they provide online tutorials.

So if you want to, give it a try.