How to Easily Create Eye-Catching Panoramic Landscape Photos

Merging multiple images into panoramas is a feature available in many editing programs and it is surprisingly easy to accomplish.

A panoramic picture comprises two or more overlapping images stitched together to produce a very wide, or tall, or both wide and tall, image. The software for creating panoramas has been readily available for over twenty years and is now included in many RAW development packages. The process is mostly automated, making the stitching process easy. However, there are steps you can take to further improve and achieve better results.

Panorama photos give the same effect of having a very wide (or tall) sensor. You can get technically precise about it and spend a lot of money on specialist tripod heads. However, they are easy to shoot with a tripod or even handheld.

The most important thing to remember is to keep all the settings the same through the exposures. The focal length, focus distance, white balance, and exposure values need to be locked. There are various ways of doing that. Let’s look at each option in turn.

Choosing the correct focal length for the shot is important. This will vary depending on your system and the lenses you own. I shoot with Micro Four Thirds and have shot panoramas at 7mm (14mm equivalent on a 35mm-sensor camera) because the lens has very little inherent distortion. Nevertheless, such a wide-angle lens can create some strange and interesting results when the images are stitched together. Therefore, I aim to shoot between 12-40mm, depending on how large and close the background subject is, and how I want it to appear in the image.

Typically, for a panorama, I want sharpness from front to back in a photo. Therefore, I focus at or just beyond the hyperfocal distance. That is the closest point at which I can focus and still have infinity in focus. In other words, it is the point that gives maximum depth of field. For my main camera with a 12mm lens at f/11, the hyperfocal distance is 0.86 metres away, and everything from 0.43 metres to infinity will be in focus. There are apps such as Photo Pills where you can look this up for your own camera, lens, and f-number combination.

Once I have auto-focused on or slightly beyond the hyperfocal distance, I switch my lens to manual focus, locking that distance.

Most of the time, I have my camera’s white balance set to auto. However, with a panorama, it might change from one end of the photo to the other. It’s easy to envisage a scenario where parts of the scene are in shadow and others are in daylight. Therefore, I set the white balance according to the dominant conditions.

With my camera, I can measure the color of the ambient light using one of the function buttons on the front of the camera’s body and aim the camera at a neutral white card. The camera will then record this as a custom preset. I can then use it for the entire series of photos. This option might be available on your camera.

It’s essential that the exposure remains consistent between shots. Otherwise, you will end up with bands of different brightnesses across the panorama.

There are different approaches to doing this. Firstly, shooting in manual mode with a fixed ISO will ensure that the exposure remains consistent across the series of photos. Secondly, with practice, you can learn not to completely release the shutter between shots, and the settings will then remain the same. I use the first method when shooting on a tripod and the second when creating an impromptu panorama handheld.

I think about the composition of the final shot before creating a panorama. I want the final image to be balanced. Generally, I find that a vertical line of symmetry works best when it has equal visual weight on both the left and right sides of the picture. This may be a couple of buildings, or a person and a tree, or maybe the hillsides on either edge of a valley. I also want something interesting in the middle of the shot.

Before I start shooting, I take a meter reading of the brightest part of the scene and set the exposure, so the highlights don’t blow out. Unless the sun is directly behind or in front of me, there can be a significant difference in the brightness of the sky on either side of the scene.

If the entire scene has a big range of tones, I might consider bracketing the exposure at each position and combining those to give a high dynamic range (HDR) photo. Most cameras will automatically perform exposure bracketing, and mine will even combine the images into a single HDR frame. Again, check your own camera to see if those options are available.

I use the camera in portrait mode, as this will make the image taller. I shoot beyond my intended edges, giving me plenty of scope to crop or correct any distortions in editing.

Keeping the camera at a 90 ° angle to the ground and parallel to the horizon gives the best results. When using a tripod, I use its bubble level to ensure the tripod is level. I confirm this by releasing the panning adjustment, rotating the camera, and checking the camera’s level gauge in each position. My tripods have panning adjustments above the ball, which make levelling the camera much easier.

Inside my camera’s viewfinder are compositional gridlines that I align with the horizon at each position, thus guiding my camera as I pan across the scene.

I then take a series of shots. doesn’t really matter which way I shoot, but I invariably start from the left and work to the right. I try to keep the camera’s lens at a fixed spot on the ground as I move to the right, pivoting around that point as I shoot. Each frame overlaps the previous one by at least a third.

Furthermore, I occasionally shoot additional frames in each position. That is because landscapes are often dynamic with moving wildlife, grass, and branches waving in the wind. One image might work better than another, and I can choose which images to use

I sometimes shoot in a W pattern. In this way, some additional frames are included above and below the main panorama. Having those available gives scope to crop the final image to the composition I want. Not all panorama software can cope with this method.

Parallax occurs when an object or scene is viewed from two different positions. Point a finger towards something, then close one eye, and then the other. Your finger will appear to move in relation to the object. When rotating the camera, there is a risk of noticeable parallax error, especially with near objects, as the camera will see them from different angles.

To avoid this, one can use a specialist tripod head that rotates the camera around the lens’s nodal point.

However, I have developed a handheld technique, as described above, that pretty much avoids this issue. Alternatively, if I am using a tripod, I mount the camera as far back as possible, minimising the lateral movement of the lens as it rotates. The screw on the quick-release (QR) plate is mounted through a slot, allowing me to change the position of the camera on the tripod.

I then turn the quick-release plate 90° from its usual position on the camera, mounting the camera on the QR plate and the plate on the head as far back as possible. Consequently, the camera body sits behind the tripod, and the nodal point of the lens is just about above where the tripod head pivots. Although not technically precise, I find it works well for natural landscapes. However, for real estate and architectural photography, greater precision is needed. In that case, a panoramic mount is needed.

Various image development and editing tools will merge raw photos into panoramas. They all work in similar ways, but some are better at coping with less overlap, parallax errors, and changes in the scene (e.g., moving waves) than others.

Typically, you select all the images to be merged, right-click on one of them, and then select a “Merge to Panorama” option. The software then performs its task, and depending on the computer’s power, the panorama is produced after a few seconds. I can merge twenty frames in under half a minute, but this may vary for you depending on the power of your computer and the size of your image files.

Some of the programs offer different options for blending various types of panoramas. Lightroom Classic has options for spherical, cylindrical, and perspective projections, while ON1 Photo Raw adds a mosaic option to that.

The merged file may be in a DNG raw format, a TIFF, a PSD, or a software-specific file type, depending upon the software you use.

Most of the programs will automatically crop the photos to exclude areas where there is no data. One feature in Lightroom Classic is that it can automatically fill empty areas. This works well with featureless negative space, such as the sky, but where there are more complex details, like foliage, it can result in unappealing repeating patterns.

Processing the images requires many of the same skills as those used for any other photo. However, there are some editing skills that you may find useful.

When you rotate on one spot, you are shooting the world as if it were the inside of a cylinder. When this translates onto a flat screen, however good the software is, some distortions will occur, which may need correction. It’s also easy to make a mistake when shooting by not having your camera completely level. Consequently, you end up with buildings at the edge of the frame leaning. Some editing software, including Photoshop, allows you to distort images to fix those issues.

I find that with seascapes, the software can prioritise aligning the waves that have moved between shots. This can result in an imperfect horizon. Therefore, cloning skills are also worth mastering.

Programs that create panoramas include Adobe Lightroom Classic, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements, On1 Photo Raw, Luminar Neo, and Affinity Photo. There are standalone programs too. The first one I used was in the early 2000s. Even back then, ArcSoft Panorama Maker did a good job. Others include PTGui, Autostich, Gigapan Stitch, and the free but slightly complex Hugin.

It’s worth noting that DxO Viewpoint is useful for precisely correcting lens distortions, and it can be used before stitching to achieve greater stitching success.

The beauty of panoramic photos lies in their ability to capture a great deal of detail. Therefore, they are well-suited to larger prints. As they are usually much wider than standard-format papers, they better suit paper rolls, allowing for printing to the maximum width of the paper.

This is just a brief introduction to making landscape panoramas. There is still much to be learned, especially if you want to photograph anything with geometric shapes.

Photographing simple panoramic landscapes not only helps you improve camera control and understanding of exposure but also produces some unusual images that stand apart from the mundane, so it is well worth exploring.