I’ve played around with panoramas for at least 5 or 6 years but I’ve never given them the time they probably deserve. Most of the time I don’t use a tripod; I just start at the left end of my subject and shoot by hand while scanning to the right and trying to make sure that I overlap the images by 25% to 30%. I usually remember to set my exposure manually to avoid exposure changes but I don’t always remember to set a specific white balance. Since I shoot RAW images I can fix that later if need be.
When I get back to the computer I grab the images in Lightroom and open them with the Photo > Edit In > Merge to Panorama in Photoshop command. Then I select the Auto option and let the system run until the initial panoramic image appears. If I’m not too unhappy with the initial result, I crop the rough image to a reasonable rectangle — sometimes using content-aware fill to complete some empty spaces around the edges — and do some minor editing. The panorama below is one I made of a sunrise in Three Lakes, Wisconsin using this less-than-meticulous process.
Just for fun I took some photos of the Hoover Dam but, other than making sure there was overlap of the images, I made no attempt to line them up. Instead of using the Auto option in the Photomerge dialog box I selected Collage. This generated the result below that looks kind of like a group of photos spread out by hand trying to create a single image.
[Note (11/23/12): Out of curiosity I went back and remade the above pano using the Auto setting to see what would result from trying to make a rectangular image. I was surprised to find that this produced a better overlap of the components and didn’t create any duplicate roads or mountains like you can see in the original attempt. The new version is shown below. ]
One of my goals is to be more patient with panoramas in the future. I’ll be curious to see if using a tripod and taking more care with each of the steps in the process will generate better results. More of my practice panoramas are shown below.
