Courthouse in Sicily

I quite enjoy panoramic shots.  I like the suspense of not knowing exactly what the end result will be.  Some don't work at all while others that I thought wouldn't work come out amazingly well.  Here is a finished shot of the courthouse in Messina, Italy (home of the Mafia, of course!).  I wanted to capture the imposing hand of justice in a draconian, black and white style.  Although the true structure is actually straight, the fish eye effect gives the impression of the law looking out in every direction.

Panoramas look expensive because in the past they could only be shot with a very expensive lens.  I often get comments like "You're very professional, you must have a very expensive camera!"  Fortunately, there's a work-a-round for that expensive lens you don't want to carry.

I shoot multiple exposures left-to-right overlapping them by about one third or so.  This one was 5 exposures.  By remembering to shoot left-to-right, processing the shots is easier since the images appear in the correct panoramic order in an image browser application like Adobe Bridge. Then I use ArcSoft's Panorama Maker 5 to stitch the images together automatically often with some manual tweaking.  Be sure to have plenty of RAM.  I have 8 gigs.  The more exposures, the more memory you need.  Afterwards, I'll adjust the image using Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop.  The warp tool in Photoshop is a real life saver.  Panoramas that are not quite symmetrical or missing a corner can be stretched appropriately.

Also, because the shots are multiple exposure, the size of the finished image is impressive as well.  This image is 7199 pixels wide by 4268 pixels high.  My Canon D7 otherwise is an 18 megapixel camera which is 5184 x 3456.  So even if I owned a really expensive fisheye lens, I could not get such a large final image.  This isn't important for displaying the work on a display, but if the panorama is to be printed large scale, the large file size is really fantastic.