2019 WEEK 17: Stitched Panoramas & Vertoramas

Rocky Mountain Rainbow by Jeanie Sumrall-Ajero

This week your challenge is to create a stitched panorama or a vertorama (vertical panorama). I am emphasizing “stitched” because in a future challenge I will be building on that skill. (Note: If you create a panorama using a phone app this week, you might not have the skills you will need to complete the future challenge I have planned.) Your panorama/vertorama can be of any subject you choose. For example, in a previous panorama challenge from 2009, the sample images include an aisle in a bookstore, the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC as well as a C-5 Galaxy aircraft. Vertoramas are currently popular for photographing the inside of cathedrals, but can also create unique landscape images.

Panoramas/vertoramas are a good choice whenever you find yourself wanting to capture more of a scene than you can capture in a single frame. They are also useful if you know that you will print a very large image because stitching multiple images together is effectively increasing the megapixels of your resulting photo.

There are two parts to creating a stitched panorama/vertorama:

Taking the photos. There are special considerations when taking the photos, e.g. consistent exposure as well as how much to overlap, that will greatly affect your success with step 2.
Stitching the photos together.

There are of course numerous tutorials online that explain in detail how to accomplish these steps. Here are a couple that I think are particularly helpful:

As for software to stitch the photos together, here is an article listing a number of options (some of which are free): Best Panorama Software for Stitching Images. I personally have had good luck with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, though there have been a couple of times I was unable to get them to work. In those cases I found Microsoft ICE to be very good and easy to use. (Microsoft ICE is free, but it is Windows-only. There are other options listed in the link above that include software for Mac.)

To recap this week’s challenge:

Create a stitched panorama/vertorama made from at least five photos. The choice of subject is up to you.
Post your photo during the week of Sunday, April 21 and Saturday, April 27.
Please remember to comment on at least FIVE photo submissions this week by answering the question “why?” in your comments. In other words, “why do I like (or not like) this photo?” or “why did this photo catch my eye?” Thank you!

The friendly community guidelines are pretty simple:

Take a new photo for the current weekly theme, not something from your back catalog or someone else’s image.
Post your photo each week to our active communities on Facebook or Flickr (or both). Tag the photo: #2019photochallenge #photochallenge #tempusaura
Don’t leave home without your camera. Participating in the 2019 Trevor Carpenter Photo Challenge is fun and easy.