If you love lots of fine detail in your photos, you simply have to try multi-row panoramas. Essentially, the technique involves shooting the scene in a series of overlapping segments, just as you would with a panorama. But instead of a single row, you do several rows to create an entire grid of photos. The longer the lens and the wider the grid, the more resolution you can achieve. The individual images are then stitched together in Photoshop or a dedicated pano stitcher, such as PTGui. This can give you an astonishing level of detail and enables you to make a huge print or even a wall mural.
We look first at the basics of multi-row shooting, from camera settings to tripod techniques. The fundamentals are simple, but it gets more advanced depending on what you’re shooting. Basically, if you decide to include objects that arebecause you have to account for parallax when rotating and tilting the camera, which can lead to misalignment between frames. As such, we’ll delve into parallax correction and nodal points over the page. But if you’re shooting a relatively distant scene, we shot the Swiss village of Spiez above, then parallax has minimal effect, which makes the technique easier as there’s no need to find the optical centre of your lens; you can just stick the camera on a tripod and eyeball it.
