Huge panoramas and the problem of detail
While it is great to use the tools available today to create panoramas from your photos, publishing them online sometimes reduces the impact of what you’ve created.
Panoramas are something that became second nature to me since digital arrived. The possibility to do with digital stitching something that would take hours in the darkroom opened new frontiers of exploration. But showing panoramas on the Web takes away the grandeur of the panorama created.
I’ve used panoramas in my photography since the very first digital camera I started to use on a regular basis. With my Canon D30, a 3.1 millions of pixels professional model from 2000 – sold in a package with an astounding 1 GB IBM Microdrive, with the
You see, we had just started with digital, and a 3,1 MP camera seemed too little for people used to scan transparencies to transform them in the 70MB size files we were told we needed for printing magazines and books.
I remember one of the first series of panoramas I created for publication: they were of airplanes at airshows. Not the moving ones, but those on a static display. Suddenly I had a solution for editors asking for enough pixels for a double page spread: panoramas. Everybody was happy and I believe we, photographers, felt a bit like magicians, because we had the tools – and for many people the secret – to do those fantastic things.
One thing I learned very early was that contrary to all the rules told about the creation of panoramas – you need a tripod, you need special tools, etc – I could do many of my panoramas by hand, if I practiced a lot the movements and understood the technique. After all, on many occasions I did not have time or the possibility to setup a tripod. So, I learned very quickly to do series of images that would align well when inside the