Combining an action sequence into a single image

Saturday 18 October 2025, 14:41 by Nando Harmsen | 2,491 views | 2 comments

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

With action photography, you quickly end up taking a lot of photos. In fact, it is enough to keep just one image from a series: the best one. The rest can go. Or you can get creative and combine them.

From an action sequence, you keep the best one. You do not really look at the rest anymore, because they are not as good as the best one in the series. Apart from one or two, you can throw them all away.

It is also possible to combine a number of images from a series into a compilation. An action sequence in a single photo. It does not work for every type of sequence, but panning often offers an option.

I was recently in Lofoten, where we also photographed white-tailed eagles. Catching a fish from the water is a typical moment for taking a series of photos to capture that one moment.

This is the most interesting photo from a series of five. The remaining four can go. Or can they?
With panning, the movement of the subject, the eagle in this case, is parallel to the camera. In each photo, the eagle is in a different position relative to the background.

The five images of the eagle, cropped so that the eagle and background can be seen more clearly. Each photo shows a different part of the background.
Because the eagle flies in front of a different part of the background, these photos can be combined into a single photo. A kind of panorama, but with the five positions of the eagle visible.

Combining them as a panorama in the usual way is not possible. But it can be done manually. Make sure that every photo has exactly the same editing, and remove any vignetting if necessary. Then open the photos as layers in Photoshop.

Enlarge the canvas in the direction of movement and shift each photo until the background lines up seamlessly. There will be a lot of overlap, but that is not a problem. Temporarily set the opacity of the layer you are moving to 50% so that you can see what you are doing.

A screenshot of Photoshop showing the layers and masks.
Do this for every photo. Create a mask on each layer and use the brush to make the parts you want to see visible or invisible.

Pay attention to details such as shadows, drops, overlapping parts and so on. The result is a panorama showing five eagles catching a fish.

The photo will probably be very large, more than 16,000 pixels in my case. Crop the photo and, if desired, reduce the canvas to a usable size, for example 8,000 pixels.

The final result of a white-tailed eagle catching a fish from the water.
This of course only works when you have used panning. But you can create variations on it. Be creative.

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