There are some landscapes where the photo taken from a regular camera is not large enough to take everything in.  Of course there are special cameras which can take a whole 360 degree panoramic view, but if you don’t have one of those then you’d have to be content in stitching the pictures.

 

Of course this could be done with a wide-angle lens.  And in fact some cameras which dub themselves as panoramic are just the same shots, only boxed in with black borders top and bottom.  Though there are problems with wide-angle lenses.  Too wide and the shots start to show barreling, where the straight lines at the sides of the picture are curved.  Fish-eye lenses are natural progression of the barreling effect.

 

The alternative is called stitching.  With manual cameras, stitching is done by taking multiple pictures of a landscape or building.  The pictures are of different parts of a larger picture.  For instance, when taking a picture of a building, you can take portrait oriented (tall) pictures, maybe about nine of pictures, three of the top thirds, another three of the middle third of the building and three more of the bottom thirds.  After developing the film, the nine photos are mounted overlapping each other as a single large picture.

 

Some photo exhibits or nature exhibits do away with stitched photos do away with a rectangular form, and instead mount the photos according to the general shape of the subject.  A stitched photo of a lake may be oval in shape.

 

With today’s digital cameras, there are some, like Canon, which come packaged with photo-stitching software. Alternatively, this could be done manually with Photoshop or most other photo manipulation/editing software.  There are also photo-stitching software which are free and available for download from the web.  

 

The first requirement when doing photo stitching is the set of pictures.  The pictures should overlap a bit when they were shot.  In doing this, it is best if you use markers on the big picture, and to have the neighboring shots include these markers.  For instance, if you were to shoot the other bank of a river, use specific trees or other landmarks as markers, and make sure that succeeding shots include these.  And to minimize any errors, it would help if the overlap were around 25% on each side.  

 

[Note:  The 25% overlap could be less, but not more.  If you used a 25% overlap on each side, each shot would effectively have only a 50% unique area.  All the rest are shared with the neighboring pictures.  If the planned picture were to use more than one plane, each of the shots would only have a unique area of about 25%]

 

The only variables which could not be controlled would be the lighting.  Cloudy weather, with gusts of wind means that the sunshine would vary for the shots.  For the most part, these gradations would have to be cleaned up manually, after the photo stitching.

 

Most photo stitching software I’ve used are fairly automatic.  You load up the pictures, in any order and the software would rearrange the photos (like solving a jigsaw puzzle with rectangular pieces) and stitch the photo with no user intervention.

 

Photo stitching is a fun exercise but it’s not for everyone as it takes a lot more post-production work than the actual photography.