Panoramic Photography

Sometimes the lens on your camera can’t quite capture the splendor of the vista in front of you. You can try different lenses, but a wide-angle lens seems to push the beauty farther away, losing the immediacy and detail of the landscape, while a telephoto lens won’t do justice to the wide expanse you are trying to photograph. The techniques shared in this online workshop exploring panoramic photography can help you get an image with a perspective that more closely resembles what you are seeing while also dramatically increasing the capture size of your camera sensor.

In four online group sessions over two weeks led by photographer Tom Gaukel, this new workshop covers the various ways to create panoramas by photographing overlapping sequential frames and then stitching them together on your computer. The workshop looks at several capture techniques in order of ascending complexity: cropped single frame, iPhone Pano Mode, handheld capture, a standard tripod, a tripod with a panoramic head, double-row, cylindrical, and spherical.

Once you have learned the nuances of panoramic capture, we look at the software used to stitch the sequence of images together, including Photoshop, Lightroom, Capture One, PTGui, and Hugin. Then, we investigate how to enhance the stitched result in Photoshop and add the finishing touches. Throughout the workshop, Tom reviews the fundamentals of photography that are important when creating panoramic images, such as the interrelation between aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, as well as image resolution, file format, bit depth, and image compression.

Here is an overview of the workshop schedule and what’s covered during each class session:

Session 1:

• What constitutes a panorama and historical examples
• Techniques in order of ascending complexity
• Cropped 35mm
• iPhone camera Pano Mode

Session 2:

• Handheld capture
• Camera on tripod without pano head
• Pano heads and parallax distortion
• Camera on tripod with pano head
• Using the appropriate focal length

Session 3:

• Stitching in Lightroom, Photoshop, and Capture One
• Double-row panoramas
• Large format printing

Session 4:

• Other stitching software – PTGui and Hugin
• 360º interactive panoramas
• Spherical interactive panoramas