Street Corner in Heraklion

Sometimes when I’m out with my camera I’ll see a shot in my eye that I want to take, but when I go to frame it in the camera I just can’t get the composition that I want.   This particularly happens when I’m in a tight space, and there’s a limit to how far back I can move relative to the subject.   The ideal solution to this would be to use a wider lens, but this relies on you having the wider lens in the first place.  For this shot, taken in Heraklion in Crete, I didn’t, so I had to be a little more inventive.

The trick here was to take multiple shots, with the aim of stitching them together into one panorama in post-processing.  I’ve done this before, and so I knew what steps to take when taking the shots to make the image processing a little easier, and the final image more convincing as a single shot.

The first step is to get the horizon level.  For this shot, the horizon isn’t obvious, but if you look to the end of both of the streets you can just about make out where it is, and see that I put it bang in the middle of the frame.  To get this final image I’m going to need to take three photos – starting on the left, rotating a little for a shot of the centre, and rotating again for a shot of the right.  If the horizon isn’t level then getting these three to line up will not be easy, and the whole result will look crooked.

So that sorted, I next need to worry about focus.  I switch to manual focus so that the camera doesn’t focus on three different distances in each of the three shots.  I pre-focus the lens to the square sign next to the doorway in the centre of frame, and as it’s a reasonably bright day even in the shade, I can easily use a small aperture to keep most of the scene in focus.

Finally I need to get the exposure right.   This is more tricky – the street to the right is brighter than the street to the left – mainly as it is wider – but the sky to the left is brighter than the sky to the right.   I do a few test shots on both, varying the shutter speed (I’ve already set my aperture) to get an exposure that looks reasonably good on both extremes, and use this exposure then for all three shots.

With framing, focus and composition set, all I need to do is wait for the streets to go relatively free of pedestrian traffic and then, keeping my legs steady and turning my waist, I take the three shots and remember to leave plenty of overlap so that when I later bring them into Photoshop Elements, they’ll stitch together nicely.  And they did.