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Multi-picture Composites, Part 1
By sirsnapalot | July 22, 2009
In the past few months, I have started taking a lot of multiple picture composites. These can be a more traditional panorama- a swath of pictures taken horizontally (or vertically). They can also be a grid of pictures, or a non-linear assortment of pictures that at least overlap somewhat.
The more I experiment with this technique, the more I am intrigued and want to experiment. This is the first of many parts of this technique, and are just a couple of results taken this past weekend.
To take a multiple picture composite, you need to lock down your exposure settings so the colors and tones don’t change from picture to picture. Then you need to shoot your pictures in some predetermined way. Start with some simple ones, then as you get the feel for it and see those results, get creative.
Mustangs at Williams Square in Las Colinas
This first shot consists of 19 different pictures, taken while lying underneath this sculpture on the ground with my 50mm lens. What’s really cool about this shot is the picture itself has almost a 3D feel to it, since it appears to tilt into the distance. Controlling this aspect is difficult, though- I have not gotten a tight control over it (my results are not completely predictable in how they’ll look when I’m finished). Needless to say, though, I was really pleased with this result.
The other picture sequence I took on a Sunday drive around a couple of Dallas lakes and surrounding towns. You don’t have to get far outside Dallas to start seeing more traditional town squares.
Rockwall County Courthouse and Sky
This was a 10-picture composite, taken with a wide-angle lens set at 17mm. At the bottom left you can see the courthouse (it would have been nice if the flag was flying 
. I wanted to capture the ominous clouds (there was a lot of booming thunder), and to some extent, I did capture them, though they are a little bright in this exposure. The field of view here is at least 120°, and probably would have been nice to get one more veritcal row of pictures on the right side.
Still, I think it nicely captures the scene with some dramatic effect. And I had no idea it would be more oval in appearance.
In both of these cases, the final combination of pictures was not quite so clean- you will need to clean up the edges and trim bits of the picture to make it more pleasing. For these pictures, I used Adobe Photoshop CS3′s built in function called Photomerge (under File->Automate). It works quite well with little user input. More on this in the future, along with some alternative autotitch software solutions.
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Topics: Advanced, Creative, Multi, Technique | 2 Comments »
July 23rd, 2009 at 23:30
Thanks for posting about this, I would love to read more about this topic.
July 28th, 2009 at 19:15
Jeff, I like these a lot, especially the concept, and the resulting non-rectangular framing. I really can not sit here typing, when I am dying to try this out!