David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

The Panorama

Panoramas are more of a parlor trick than a photography standard; after all, the prints don't fit any standard picture frame, and they don't have much impact unless you get them printed at a big, juicy size. (When they appear any smaller—in a photography book, for example—panoramas just look like a slice from a standard-sized photo.)

Anyway, the point of a panorama is to capture a much, much wider slice of the landscape than you could with a single photo. And you do it by taking several successive side-by-side shots, turning the camera a bit each time. Later, either you or the camera stitches them together into a continuous, seamless, super-wide photo.

If your camera has a Panorama mode, great; use it. You'll see, on the screen, the ghosts of the photos as you take them, for ease in lining up the adjacent shots. And when you shoot the final one, the camera will combine all the component shots automatically. When you dump the photos to your computer, you'll get one very wide shot.

If you have an SLR or an advanced compact, you may not have a Panorama mode. And even if you do, you might want to build the panorama manually, to gain control and avoid problems.

What kind of problems? The kind where the exposure (brightness), focus, or white balance of the scene changes from shot to shot. Those unfortunate problems make the individual segments stand out in the finished panorama, ...