Panorama!

When I say it, "PANORAMA", I think I should say as if making an announcement. Saying it a little louder, and little more distinct every time I say it; with a rhythm and each syllable getting equal time. One can put the accent on any syllable and will get the same result. We've got a big, WIDE picture.
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When a 3000 pixel wide picture just can’t do the trick, why not take several, starting from the left and moving to the right? When I first started doing that I found out that my metering changes just a bit with each shot, the light changes and the camera adjusts. That didn’t work out too well when I tried to stitch the pictures together. So, what I did was switch over to manual settings on the camera, found the right exposure, and then started to left, then moving to the right, each time overlapping from one picture to the next by about 1/3rd.
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Then I let Photoshop do the rest. It stitches and blends and does things I didn't think was possible. It takes several pictures and blends them into one, homogeneous blend of color, form, and light without a hint of where they were stitch. Coooool.
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I also had to learn that on wide angle, the blending isn’t too cool. What happens is the light at the edges gets a hint darker and then it still shows up in blending. So, it’s better to take five shots at 55mm then three shots at 28mm. Going from left to right – click, click, click, click, and then click. Rather than click, click, and click and cover the same area.
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Now my little Nikon has a PANORAMA mode. It shows exactly where to overlap from the previous picture to get the best stitching. That’s cool. But I haven’t fooled enough with it to tell if it holds the metering from the first shot. I’ll have to check that out.
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This picture is from the top of the mountain in the Smoky Mountain National Park above Gatlinburg on US Route 441 and it was taken with my Daddy Nikon. I could have posted a wider one, but then when you go wide you don’t get very high when I’m posting such a small image. These images are HUGE. They can print out at least to 60 inches wide and still maintain a fairly good quality – at least National Geographic grade.
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With that, let me just say, one more time. “PANORAMA!”