Remember to Shoot Panoramic

Today’s Post by Mark Toal

It’s fall and everywhere you look the landscape is amazing. Leaves changing, great clouds and shadows are everywhere. Even with a wide-angle lens like the Lumix G Vario 7-14mm on Panasonic Lumix GX8 it’s hard to capture the view of what your eyes see.

I was making one of my favorite drives from Reno to Carson City then up to Virginia City and then back down to Reno. Coming down Geiger Grade from Virginia City you get an incredible view of Washoe Valley, Reno and the Sierra Nevada mountain range. At one of the turnouts high above the valley I pulled over and walked a few hundred yards and saw this view.

Looking through the viewfinder the wide-angle lens didn’t capture the scene the way that I saw it. Like a lot of mirrorless cameras, the GX8 allows me to switch to a dedicated panoramic mode that prompts me to move the camera across the scene as it take images and stitches them together. Tip: If possible set your camera to shoot while holding the camera vertically, not horizontally. This will give you an image with more height as opposed to a very wide, narrow image.

If your camera doesn’t have a dedicated panoramic setting you can still get the same affect by taking individual photos and overlapping them by approximately 25% as you shoot. There are a lot of software that will stitch them together including Adobe Lightroom.

Contrary to what you read you do not need a tripod to shoot panoramic images. The camera or the software will correct for most problems when it stitches the images together.