Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

3.2. Stage 2

3.2.1. Scouting

It was 11 o'clock on an April morning; the light was sharp and perfect. As the wind came up, the windsurfers all rushed into the water despite the cold. I took a position near the shore so I could capture the scene up close with a 35mm lens. Unfortunately, the windsurfers raced by me and gathered in the distance.

If I had taken only a single shot for each of the eight photographs that comprise the panorama, the foreground would have been empty.

I needed to take at least five shots of each picture in order to have enough sails and kites to fill the scene when the panorama was later assembled.

With a little luck, I would find 8 photos among those 40 pictures (5 shots × 8 views) that would line up well enough to connect the waves in the foreground. It would make the later retouching work that much easier.

Assembling a panorama with such changeable and unpredictable subject matter might seem overly ambitious. But if the scene had been static, and therefore easy to handle, the photograph would have been disappointing. With the tools and techniques at my disposal, everything is possible. The key is to start with a precise vision of the final image, because that will determine how you go about taking the pictures. Later, assembling the montage will be fast, and it won't need to be changed.