A long time ago I was on a family trip in Alaska and we were camping outside of Homer. It was a lazy day with intermittent storms rolling through. Since we were next to a bay with some great clouds overhead, my brother asked my Dad if he could teach him to make a Pano. They spent a good 90 minutes going everything from the camera, the lens, the tripod head, the points in each composition to line up, everything. There was just so much to do in each Pano in order to get it right. Then of course there was all the time in the computer stitching it all together. I think about that afternoon whenever I work on a Pano these days. Like this one for instance.
While in North Dakota I had to do an quick interview with Warren for a video project for the Texas Flying Legends Museum. While some of the planes were in the maintenance hangar being worked on about half of the fleet were parked in their resting spots at the Dakota Territory Museum. Bernie had done a great job positioning them with the Zero in the center facing the hangar doors and the TBM and Corsair on either wing. In order to get the best light for the video we opened up the hangar doors and humorously everyone made a comment about the light. Well before we closed up I did one quick take with the D4 and 24-70 in front of the Zero. This five frame pano was done hand holding the camera and then stitched together in Adobe Camera Raw. The quality is just mind blowing! I still cannot believe that the program does such a great job considering how many lines are going throughout this composition. Landscapes are easy because they don’t have lots of straight lines but these hangars and planes sure do. Seamlessly though it was all put together. The one thing that you have to do when making a pano is to have about a 30% overlap in the composition in the images so that everything lines up right.