Wide-Angle Composite Photography

by Paul Kelley 

I enjoy photography and love the look of a wide angle shot. The problem for me, and possibly for you too, is that I don’t have a thousand dollars to drop on a sweet wide angle lens. This posed a problem for me when I was planning my trip to Europe this past July. I knew I would be in front of these massive buildings and wouldn’t be able to back up enough to get the whole subject in frame. As you can see below, I can't get it all into my viewfinder.

I entertained the idea of renting a lens, but that can be expensive plus you run the risk of a freak accident damaging a lens that you are now on the hook to fix. There was the possibility of borrowing a lens and, while that certainly took care of the cost factor, the freak accident scenario was now even more treacherous. 

I decided to forget about buying/renting/borrowing and instead I stiched together a bunch of images into one big wide angle photo using a Photoshop feature that I never really play with, Photomerge. 

What you’ll need

• We’ll start with the obvious, you need your camera. Preferably a DSLR but a point and shoot that can lock your auto exposure should do just fine.
• A camera card with a lot of free space. Remember each image you want to take will be comprised of a dozen or more so you want to have enough space. Also, a higher write speed is preferable because the wait time between each photo will be shorter.
• Photoshop. It's what I use, so it's what I know.

Keep in mind

There are a few things to remember when doing this to ensure that your composite image comes out looking its best.

Lock your exposure

Locking your exposure is very important. If you don’t lock it when you meter your first shot, then your camera will try to measure the light that’s in the viewfinder every time you take a photo which will lead to an inconsistent look across all of your photos especially if your subject has a lot of highlights and shadows throughout. If you want the sky to be blue in your image, meter for the sky. If you want your subject and foreground to be vibrant, meter for that.

Use one focal length

If you have a fixed lens, then you have nothing to worry about. But if you don't, make sure you don’t zoom in or out while you’re taking all the images for the large photo.

Overlap each shot

Make sure that you’re overlapping from image to image. If you don’t, then you’ll have gaps in your final photo and that’s not going to give you the results your looking for in the end.

Plant your feet and pivot

Remember that each frame will make up one large image from one focal point. This means you only want to pivot your camera around to take each image as if it’s on a tripod. If you move from left and right or up and down you’ll get weird stretching in your final shot.

Time to make the donuts

Let's get to work. Think about how you want to frame your shot and center the subject in front of you. Positioning your subject off center could provide cool results but let's focus on the little things first and you can experiment later. Remembering what I said about pivoting, take enough images to cover everything you want to have in your final shot. Below are all the frames I used in my shot. I like to start in the middle and make my way around in large circles.

Now that we have all the frames we'll let Photoshop work its mojo. We're looking for Photomerge, it's located under File/Automate.

Now all we have to do is select all the images we want to use and check off some settings.

When you have everything set, click OK and let Photoshop take it from here. It'll open up the files, place all the frames in the right place and manipulate them so that everything lines up. Depending on how much RAM you have you might want to grab a coffee, sometimes it can take a while. When the process is complete you'll see something like this.

Hopefully your merged image will be very close to your initial vision and will require only minor tweaking. As you can see from my example there's some warping going on so we want to try to fix that and give us a nice straight horizon line.

Now all you have to do is crop out the jagged edges, and you're pretty much set!

I hope you'll be as happy with your final result as I was with mine.