Panoramas

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Panoramic landscape photos, the ones that are composed of several individual shots that are stitched together by a software, are fun because they offer a view that cannot be achieved by naked eye. By the way, I think this is one of the main criteria for “interestingness” of a photo – it should show something that I viewer would not normally see by him/herself, e.g. an extreme close-up, a frozen motion, a unique point of view or colour combination, etc.

For panoramas, I find that composing the final image is a challenge, because at the time of shooting, my brain picks the focal points of the individual sectors, not that of the final image. As a result, panoramas often either don’t have a compositional focus or have multiple competing elements (e.g. a mountain, a cloud formation, a rock in the foreground, etc.) Because it is difficult to visualize the end result at the time of shooting, I like using my iPhone camera for panoramas. It allows me to see the result right away instead of waiting until I stitch the individual images on a computer. Of course, the technical quality is inferior, compared to an image produced by a DSLR, but I think the main appeal of panoramas is their initial impact (the panoramic nature of the scene being the main element of the composition), so the instant feedback offered by the phone camera is worth the penalty in noise, banding and other defects. As one prominent photographer, who’s name escapes me, said about excessive noise in particular, “if people a concerned about noise in your photo, you have a boring image!”

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