As I work through the photos for my post on our Little Horse hike in Sedona I’ve been playing with panoramas.When we got to the plateau I wanted to capture the hoodoos and structure towering over us. I find that panoramas help get across the idea of the big spaces and colors in the red rocks area. But panoramas aren’t perfect.
Here is a panorama as taken using that function on my Sony SLT A65
I’m not delighted with this; rather than getting a sense of the size of the rocks I have a scrunched image.
No worries, I knew I could take a group of overlapping images and stitch them together in Photoshop. I had never done it before but I figured a little investigation on Lynda.com would help me out. Here are the images I picked to stitch – moving left to right.
When I pulled them into Photoshop to put them together I got a TIFF file that was over 2 GB in size! Here is a screen shot of the result; the full image was too large to include in a blog post.
You can see the curve at the top of the six individual images. You can also see that I pulled the camera down as I panned to the right; that could be a problem.
I pulled the image back into Lightroom to crop and level.
This is better than the camera panorama in that we can see the base of the rocks better; but it still doesn’t capture the grandeur of the real deal.
I think the panoramas work better on distance shots; we were just too close to this to get the effect I wanted.
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