Photographing or cropping a panorama

Sunday 22 January 2023, 15:30 by Nando Harmsen | 4,802 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Sometimes it is nice to have a panorama. It gives you a sense of space and can be impressive. You can do this in two ways.

Make a panorama with multiple photos and then stitch them together, or use a wide-angle lens and make a panorama crop. Which do you choose?

We were standing on the beach of the Opal Coast, a place where panorama photography can produce beautifully expansive images. How you make a panorama essentially depends on the lens you have available.

On the beach on 1 January, the day I took the photo in this article. The weather was dark and rainy, with strong, stormy winds. Lovely.
An empty beach is... Well, empty, of course. In that case, the angle of view you have makes little difference to the sense of space. Whether you photograph at 15mm or 35mm, what you get in the photo is emptiness. Unless, of course, there are things relatively close by on the horizon.

But the focal length makes a big difference to the foreground. And that foreground can be very important in panorama photography, since you then have a clear subject. This is what I found on the Opal Coast.

I had my 15-35mm lens on the camera and was standing close to the foreground. It was so large that I could not get it completely in the frame. So I took two photos, handheld. I thought, I will stick them together at home later.

The unedited two photos I wanted to use for the panorama. Ignore the dirt on the sensor. That is the risk of changing lenses on the beach in these weather conditions. I will clean the sensor again at home.
But then I started thinking. Why go to the trouble of stitching two images together if I can simply stand a few metres further back and capture everything in one image? So that is what I did. And indeed, everything was captured in one photo.

The same scene in one image, simply by standing a little further away. I will make the crop to panorama format at home. And I will clean my sensor then too. It needs doing.
But an ordinary photo is not a panorama photo, of course. This is a normal 3:2 aspect ratio, as it comes out of my camera. With a lot of sky, too much even. A wide-angle lens has a wide angle not only from left to right, but also from top to bottom.

Fortunately, there is a good solution, one I often use. I select the crop tool in Lightroom Classic and make it a 2:1 ratio. A panorama crop, in other words. And yes, it gives a fantastic sense of space.

This raises the question: in this case, is it better to stitch the two photos together into a panorama instead of making a panorama crop? I would say, absolutely not in this case. In fact, all the work involved in stitching the photos together adds no value here.

The unedited panorama stitched together in Lightroom Classic. I am afraid it still needs some work. But at first glance, the photo is not very different from a single image.
But especially for this article, I did stitch the photos together after all. It took quite a bit of work, since the alignment was not completely perfect everywhere. I had not taken parallax into account, and the photos were taken handheld.

A panorama made from two photos. Edited to taste.
Although the photos look the same at first glance, they are actually very different. You will have to ignore the colour difference for now, since both photos have had their own editing applied. In addition, the cloud pattern is slightly different because of the time difference between the photos.

First of all, there is the distortion caused by my standing closer with the panorama. You can see this in the shape of the foreground.

Look closely and you will also see that the wider angle of view of the stitched panorama means that the rock face in the background appears smaller in the frame.

This is logical, of course, because the angle of view has become wider with the panorama than with a single image. This is certainly something to take into account.

Why is the foreground not smaller in the stitched panorama? Because in both cases I chose the distance to the foreground so that it appeared the same size in the frame.

Normally, a panorama with 30% overlap between the photos gives you a huge increase in resolution. In my case, the single photo in the 2:1 crop is 8,192 x 4,096 pixels. Because of the large overlap I used, the panorama is 8,357 x 4,179 pixels. Not such a big difference.

Of course, I can do this differently. I can take portrait-oriented photos for the panorama. In that case, the height would be around 8,000 pixels, which at a 2:1 ratio would amount to 16,000 pixels wide.

A panorama made from a number of portrait-oriented photos. The total image is 14,266 x 8,024 pixels. This was taken at 24mm, and I did not have a wider angle available to capture this. If I had used a 15mm focal length, it would have been possible to capture this in a single photo, one measuring 8,192 x 5,464 pixels, which would have been more than enough.
There are a few disadvantages to a panorama made from vertical shots. First of all, the resolution becomes enormous, and you have to ask yourself whether this is really necessary. Do you need 16,000 x 8,000 pixels?

Secondly, it takes time to stitch multiple shots together, and your computer needs enough processing power to handle this smoothly. Finally, the technique is difficult when there is movement in the photo.

Another advantage of a panorama crop instead of a stitched panorama can be seen in this photo with a beach surfer. A wonderfully expansive panorama, in which the photo was taken at exactly the right moment to round off the New Year celebrations on the Opal Coast.
If you do need a lot of pixels, or your focal length is not short enough for the right angle of view, then you should photograph a panorama, preferably using portrait-oriented photos.

Just make sure that you do not use 15mm for your panorama, as I did. You will get far too much sky and foreground in the frame. A longer focal length is the best choice in that case.

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