High Dynamic Range Digital Photography For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Creating Panor-Ahhh-Mas

In This Chapter

• Photographing HDR panoramas

• Processing the darned things

• Sewing the frames together in Elements

Find some room to move around. This chapter starts out a bit like an aerobics class.

Look straight ahead and stretch your arms straight in front of you. Keeping them straight, pull your arms back (like opening a double door) until you can't see them anymore. Still looking straight ahead, bring your arms back forward until they just come back into your field of vision. Keeping your arms in position, look to the left and right to see where they are. This exercise (pun intended) shows you what human eyes see pan-oramically, which is a pretty wide angle of view — about 120 degrees or so, including peripheral vision. However, unless you're working with a wide or ultra-wide angle lens, this isn't what a camera sees, so photos don't come close to this.

So how can you create panoramas? No need for fancy equipment. With any lens you have in your kit (even compact digital or super-zoom cameras work well for panoramas, as long as you can use them for HDR), you can create a single wide-angle image by merging multiple frames. Akin to HDR, you take more than one photo of a scene to create a single final image. Panoramas and HDR go well together: Panorama techniques extend your angle of view, and HDR captures a greater dynamic range of the scene. And this chapter is dedicated to helping you create exciting HDR panoramas, whether indoors or out.

Shooting Panoramas ...