I'm working a new angle on photography. Sure you've seen me shoot panoramas before. But, you haven't seen me shoot these kinds of panoramas. What we have here is a 10 image composite encompassing about 180 degrees of view. It was made using my Nikon D1h and 14mm f/2.8 lens. As you can see, I think the results are incredible. So, you're saying "how did I do that" or "why is this pano any different than the others that came before"? The answers to your questions are on the way.

There's a couple of ways to make panoramic images. The obvious first approach is to use a single camera or piece of film that somehow through the trick of technology creates a short but very wide image that covers a wide field of view. That approach has been used since the beginnings of photography by some very clever photographers. Sometimes the technology over-shadowed the imagery because the technical achievements to capture such wide images were tremendous and expensive. Panoramas were a field of photography exclusively available to the richest or most eccentric.

Fast forward to today and you have digital technology here for the rescue. The cool thing about digital technology is you can use normal format digital cameras and merge the captures together that otherwise would take forever and hundreds of dollars in a wet film darkroom. Panoramas are now available for the common man due to the explosion of fairly inexpensive applications or features bundled with our tried and true favorites. Photoshop comes to mind. Before its latest release, Photoshop didn't have a "stitching" module imbedded in the software even though its much less expensive cousin Photoshop Elements did for at least four years. There are other 3rd party software solutions available but all have one issue or another to prevent making panoramas and stitching images together a snap and worthy of professional applications. Enter Realviz Stitcher--the most robust and easy to use panoramic software available on any platform. The important feature to me is this application is native to Mac OSX and therefore easy to merge into my normal digital darkroom workflow--a bone thrown to a Mac user.

Previously, I made my pano's by merging the images in Photoshop. By using layers, layer masks, erasers, and brush tools, I was able to sort of merge my images together. The results were acceptable but not nearly as good as using a dedicated high order application like Stitcher. Now, I can simply combine tens of images together to make huge composites indiscernable to anyone that more than one image was used to make the final product. The results are amazing. Instead of futility yearning for a high mega-pixel Nikon camera like the full frame 11mega-pixel Canon 1Ds, I can combine six Nikon D1h images and get the same results. Shoot, since I'm using slightly longer focal lengths and the "sweet spot" of my lenses per the Nikon 1.5x mag/crop factor, this technique can potentially exceed the sharpness of single shot images taken with the Canon 1Ds. Okay, this is more work but it sure beats spending tens of thousands converting equipment from Nikon to Canon. The image above is the "full frame" result of the merging process done by the software.

As you can see, the edges are curved as a result of the conversion from super-wide angled lens to the flat projection you see here. I personally like the odd framing for several reason though I know some are taken aback by its unusual characteristics. Just note, I'll be writing more articles in the future about my experiences with shooting and making panoramic images.

As for the particulars of the image? This cross is at the top of a 1,000 foot high hill behind my house. After a steep pre-dawn scramble up its slope, I set things up to capture the sun and its light on the metal cross right at sunrise. All together, the image is made up of 10 captures and merged together in Stitcher.

Cheers

Tom Hill