Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

3.3. Stage 3

3.3.1. Creating the curve

If you work with a 35mm camera, it's best to shoot your pictures freehand—as a matter of speed and flexibility—even for a panorama. When the light is changing and clouds are flying by, you have to grab your shots quickly; otherwise the pictures will be impossible to assemble. And if your subjects are moving or your shooting position requires some gymnastics, using a tripod just isn't practical.

In order to plan your shots, it's helpful to have a grid in your viewfinder.

When looking for a place to join two photos, have them meet in the middle of the picture, not at the edges, so the images have a lot of overlap. This will make the later retouching work with layer masks easier.

In a seascape where the horizon line is very powerful, curving it rearranges all the space around it, making the horizon the dominant element in the composition. If the curve is perfectly rendered, it will appear that much more meaningful, and the panorama will start to resemble a beautiful blueprint.

For a panorama such as this one, making a preliminary sketch will help you visualize the curve. When you lay the sketch out and relate it to the grid in the viewfinder, you can then accurately mark the series of junction points between pictures.

In Almanarre, I wanted to give the composition a feeling of movement, as if an imaginary wind were blowing across the picture, so I drew my curve to suggest that. I decided to make it asymmetrical and tilted slightly to the right, ...