Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

Chapter 1. Studio 01: Waterfalls of Ice

Bertrand Bodin

I have a deep commitment to nature photography and to landscape photography in particular. So when the Département des Hautes-Alpes regional council gave me an assignment for a book, I decided to showcase the incredible diversity of the department's alpine landscapes. Panoramic photography seemed like a natural choice, and I chose an image assembly technique that mimics what the human eye perceives and senses at the margins of its field of vision—the realm of what I call "perceptual photography."

Using Photoshop to assemble panoramas lets you create photographs that are wider than 180° but still have acceptable proportions: a 1:3 height-to-width ratio, which is the same as a 2.4 × 6.7 in. (6 × 17 cm) panoramic camera such as a Linhof (whose field of view is only 105° wide).

Hardware used

• Canon EOS-1Ds digital camera

• 70–200mm zoom lens, 14mm wide angle lens

• Benbo tripod

• Manfrotto 302 panoramic head

• PC with 3GHz Pentium 4 processor and 1 GB of RAM

• 19-in. Iiyama monitor

Software used

• Photoshop CS

As an example of an Hautes-Alpes mountain valley, I chose the Fressinière Valley in Ecrins National Park, the mid-winter gathering place of an international group of mountaineers called the Ice Climbing Ecrins. My idea was to show a world of ice where frozen waterfalls were part of the landscape. I scouted the location carefully, because I wanted to include a recognizable mountain to help identify the locale; I chose the Tête de Gramuzat, ...