I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like doing panoramas. They sounded REALLY complicated. Well, they aren’t. They just require some pre-planning and maybe a hobby like knitting. I kid you not – I literally waited two hours for my computer to render one of these things. But the good news is my computer does, indeed, do the rendering. I press a few buttons and then sit back, drink some tea, drum my fingers, sigh, drink some more tea and then realize I should go shopping or paint a wall. When I come back, there’s a nice panorama there.

To get that big, long image, you need to find a nice scene and take three or more photos that partially overlap. You should try to keep everything as level as possible so you don’t have problems when you have your computer stitch it together, so you may want to try using a tripod. I did for a panorama I shot with my zoom lens. And, you should set your camera on manual and set your shutter speed and aperture so they’re even across the whole panorama. One time, I forgot to do that because I was snapping off photos of the little guys going down the slide between setting up the different scenes. Well, you can totally tell. The first section is way lighter than the rest.

Wanna see one of them? I’m not sure if you can make anything out since it will be so tiny on the blog, but here goes:

Tags: