It's a stitch - Panoramic photos

Now that summer is winding down, I am slowly beginning to work my way through my photos that I have taken all summer. One of the things I focused on in my photos was panoramic shots. There were so many places we went that a panoramic was really the only way to capture the breadth of the scene.

A few tips and things that I've learned in trying to take photos to stitch together:

- Use manual mode on your camera. If you are shooting in a different mode, find the proper exposure you want and then set you camera to those settings in manual mode. This way you won't be changing aperture, shutter speed, or white balance across the different exposures.

- If you shoot holding your camera in portrait mode (vertical) it helps mitigate barrel distortion.

- You need about 25% overlap in each shot in order to help the automated processes in the various stitching software.

So here are a few examples from this summer:

Lake Cuicocha, near Otavalo, Ecuador




Imbrabura Volcano, near Otavalo, Ecuador




Skyline Drive, Shenandoah National Park, Virginia:




Skyline Drive, Shenandoah National Park, Virginia:




My program of choice for creating panoramas is Hugin, a freeware software program.