250 megapixels!!!

No, I haven't bought a new camera, but I still shot a 250-megapixel image the other day.

Well, when I say image, I mean images.  I shot 8 and then stitched them to make a panorama.  There is no way, even with my widest lens, that I'd have got the image I wanted in one frame.

I'm really chuffed with this image, so much so that I thought it would be a good idea to share my panorama workflow along with the mahoosive image I ended up with.

My workflow is as follows:

1. decide on composition

2. set up the tripod making sure that the base the head sits on is perfectly level in all directions (use the tripod's built-in bubble level if it has one)

3. attach the camera to the head, again ensuring the camera is perfectly level in both directions (use the camera's built-in level if it has one, or a spirit level if it doesn't)

4. for a horizontal panorama, set the camera up in portrait orientation, and in landscape orientation if shooting a vertical (tall) pano

5. set the exposure, including white balance) manually so it'll be consistent throughout all images

6. pan through the whole scene while looking at the histogram on the camera's screen to check for areas where highlight or shadow detail may be lost (shoot bracketed images if necessary)

7. focus your image manually (I find focusing to infinity best, though this is dictated by the subject of your image)

8. before shooting the first frame, shoot a bookmark image holding something up in front of the lens

9. shoot individual frames, ensuring they overlap by at least 50%

10. shoot more frames than you need to allow for cropping later

11. shoot another bookmark image after the last frame.

When it comes to stitching all these images together (remember the old film days of laying out your photos and overlapping them to make you panorama?!) I use Adobe Lightroom, though there are any number of (sometimes free) programs available (Hugin, PTGui to name a couple).

One warning though, the resulting files can be quite large.  The tiff image of the image above uses a huge 2.5GB on my hard drive.  But you can always store a Jpeg file which would be much smaller.

Whatever, shooting and then processing panoramas is great fun.  And modern digital techniques mean you can shoot dozens of frames covering huge areas to give you a super-scale end result.

Go on, give it a go!