Shooting a panorama in the mountains

Driving the mountains in winter is far from a preferred activity, but the beauty of majestic peaks and snow-covered trees made it a worthwhile adventure.  I am thankful that the weather held and my trip had no significant issues, although there were two semi-trucks that had slid off the road earlier in the day.  I have very few photos of these highway vistas at this time of year mainly due to the risk associated with driving in icy conditions.  

I came upon a majestic scene which happened to have a roadside turnout.  The view before me was enormous in both breadth and splendour and I felt the only way to do it honour was to shoot a panorama.  Some cameras and cell phones will allow you to complete the process automatically with little effort on the user's behalf.  I have never done it that way; rather, I shot nine separate images and stitched them together at home using Photoshop.

It is important to shoot the sequence in manual exposure mode.  You will notice the scene on the left is brighter than the scene on the right.  As I panned from left to right the sun's angle changed and objects were becoming increasingly ensconced in their own shadows.  Using an automatic exposure mode would have meant a change in things like sky, snow, and other adjoining features rendering a faulty image.  Overall I took nine pictures.  The above photo shows only a portion of the whole result.  The entire scene is below.

The full panorama as captured by 9 individual photos.

I felt that the left end added little to the overall image and the right side had too many dark values.  I cropped the image and ended up with the top photograph.  It is interesting to note that the unmodified panorama was almost 17,000 pixels wide and over 35 megabytes in size.  You could only fit one of these images on an entire Blu-ray DVD disk.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com