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Extend your composition with panorama photo
Sometimes at some point, we all facing a situation that our lens are not “wide” enough to capture what we want, even at a super wide focal length 14 mm or wider, and that’s the time you should give a try in Panorama photo. It is simple, if you can’t get it in one photo, then do it with 3 or more photos, what you need to do is put all those photos and merge it together in any software that provides panorama merging features, such as photoshop, lightroom or PTGui.
One of a good example is taking photo in Federal Mosque, Kuala Lumpur, one of the beautiful mosque in Malaysia. The mosque has its unique design that more toward
When taking the photo, I set my tripod in the center, and to create a more interesting composition, I decide to include the frame of the entrance. I am using a Nikkor 14-24mm f2.8 lens, but even at it’s widest focal length, the best result I can get is as below.
And it doesn’t turn better in Portrait mode too
So the only choices I have is to capture in Panorama, let’s do it!
I want the mosque is perfectly aligned in center, I setting the composition for the center frame first, then only I move my camera to the left to capture the left, center and right frame in the sequence. And each frame I capture 3 different exposures from -2, 0, +2.
Other than capture in Panorama, you can try with Vectorama too, depend on your own preference. 🙂
Once I back to my laptop, before merging the photos into single panorama shoot, I will need to perform exposure blending first. I pick up 0 exposure photo as the base photo, then using -2 photo to recover the highlight, I repeat the same process for left, center and right frame photos.
When I done the blending, next I open the Photoshop, go to File > Automate > Photomerge and load the 3 photos into it and click OK.
Photoshop will create the panorama photo and now I have a draft version of the panorama photo, it is super easy right? ^^
However, it is yet perfect, because the photo appears to be distorted, it will require addition steps to fix it. Depend on the situation, I will use lens correction, warp, puppet warp or adaptive wide angle tools to correct the distortion. For this time I only use lens correction and the warp tool.
After that, I crop the photo with a tighter compo and fill up some of the empty spaces at the top with Clone Stamp tool. Now I have the panorama photo perfectly merge and fix on the distortion, next I will be moving in the normal post processing routine.
In a high-level way to say, I added more red on the overall picture, playing around the contrasts, darken the frame and brighten the mosque to make it more stand out from the photo. Besides that, I also adding extra “light reflection” on the top of the photo, making it more balance.
Here is the before & after comparison.
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