Panoramic photographs have been around for a long time. Before digital photography came along, there were two ways to make a panorama. Special cameras—loaded with special extra-wide film—were capable of taking photos that were much wider than they were tall.
The other traditional way to make a panorama is to take a series of photographs and connect them, sort of like a collage. This collage technique allows you to make very, very wide panoramas. Unfortunately, you can often see the seams between each photograph, since each print is simply layered, one on top of the other.
Digital photography allows us to make panoramas in an entirely new way. Using a still camera, it is a piece of cake to take a high-resolution photograph that spans your entire field of view from left to right, including your peripheral vision.
Some cameras boast right on the box that they have this capability. Some cameras don’t. Either way, you can make a panorama; so don’t despair if it appears that your camera does not have a panorama mode. Creating a panorama on the PC is actually pretty similar to making a collage of prints. The software simply takes a series of photographs and stitches them together digitally so that the seams are essentially invisible.
Before we get there, though, we need to take the initial batch of pictures. Believe it or not, you can get some very nice panoramic photographs even if you are a bit sloppy when you take the original images. For best results, however, you should be as careful as possible when you take your pictures. Just like the old computer axiom “garbage in, garbage out,” the better your original images are, the better the final panorama will be. Panoramic images allow you to see a picture more or less the way your eyes see the real world.
