Panoramic 1: This was taken while on a cycling tour in the south of France in May 2011 on a road bridge looking out across the Étang de Vic on the left, the Mediterranean sea on the right and the Canal du Rhône à Sète in the centre. See map (left) for location.

It may not seem at first glance to be a very interesting image but I wanted to try and capture that wonderful feeling of awe, looking out over a vast, empty open space. As a bonus, looking at the image full size on screen, I keep spotting details that I hadn't noticed at the time. As it was taken hand-held I think it seems to have come out quite well.

"So how was it done?" I hear you cry. Well it was taken on a Canon 5D MkII with a 50mm lens (EF50 f/1.4 USM) which is a superb lens, great quality and brilliant in low light, as well as being small and lightweight. A perfect general purpose lens for travelling I think. I set the camera to ISO 125 as it was a bright sunny day and then took a light reading with the camera in 'AV' mode. I wanted quite a deep depth of field so set the aperture to f10 and this gave me a shutter speed 1/800 sec. So I then put the camera in full manual mode and dialed in these settings so I had a constant exposure level right across the scene. Then I took 15 images, in portrait orientation to minimise distortion and in JPG format to preserve space on the memory card. (I usually take everything in RAW). Stitched together in Photoshop it produced a finished image, after cropping slightly to remove excess blue sky and the jagged edges that inevitably occur when stitching photos together, that is 25653 x 4044 pixels. I printed the image at actual size on a roll of glossy paper and 3/4 of an hour later had a print 2172mm long by 342.4mm high (that's over 7' x 1' in old money!).

If you want to download a full size copy of the above image to study in detail you may do so here (or right-click and 'Save target as...' to download to your hard drive):
Medium Quality (6 Mb) or Full High Quality (68 Mb)
(Images © P J King).