You’ve probably heard of a panorama. These days, virtually any smartphone can take one automatically; you just have to point and pan. But cameras that don’t have a built-in panorama feature can still take them, you just take a row of overlapping photos and stitch them together later.

Even if you haven’t heard of a multi-row panorama, you can probably guess what it is. Instead of a single row, you’re actually shooting a grid of photos and stitching it all together.

Why would you want to shoot a multi-row pano though? Well there are two main benefits. The first is resolution. The tiny Canon PowerShot S100 I take with me everywhere I go has a 12 megapixel sensor, but if I’m actually taking a 5x3 grid of photos and stitching them, it’s easy to get a final product that exceeds 50 megapixels.

The second is the ability to get ultra-wide shots without an ultra-wide lens. The math for calculating your effective focal length gets a lot trickier here, but I pretty regularly shoot multi-row panos with my 50mm lens, or even my 70-210mm lens, that come out with a wider field of view than I get with my 24mm lens. This is nice, because good wide-angle glass ain’t cheap. Good mid-range focal length and even some short-to-medium telephoto glass often can be found pretty affordably though. My nifty fifty was $100.

The disadvantages are pretty much what you would think. If you’re shooting a scene with movement (swaying trees, quick-moving clouds, or human/animal elements), then you will probably run into artifacts when you’re stitching things together. This goes triple if you’re bracketing. It’s also a lot more work in post processing, although for the right scene, I think it’s totally worth it.

One last thing that bears mentioning is parallax error. Technically, as you pan and tilt for capturing different pieces of the grid, you have to make sure you’re rotating your camera/lens around the the point through which light enters the aperture. If you’re just slapping the camera on a tripod and having at it, then you’ll get some movement in the relative positions of foreground and background items between frames. This translates to stitching errors.

The problem is more pronounced as you increase your focal length, and as you increase the size of the scene you’re shooting. So if you want to shoot a gigantic multi-row pano with your 200mm lens that covers a 270 degree field of view, it’s probably worth getting a nodal rail and setting it up to rotate just right.

But if you’re just shooting a 2x2 grid with your nifty fifty (or a compact camera like I often use for multi-row panos), chances are the stitching software will have no trouble making a seamless pano from all your frames, and you don’t need to stress too much about it.

From here down is a long-winded, but very in-depth tutorial on shooting multi-row panos.

Taking a multi-row pano is pretty easy once you’ve done it a time or two. I prefer to shoot in a vertical orientation whenever possible, so if you have an L bracket, time to get it out. I went so far as to custom design and 3D print an L bracket for my PowerShot S100. Ridiculous, I know, but it was cheap and really improved my results. Zoom in (or select the right lens) to get the focal length you want. Obviously a longer focal length will require more frames to get the same field of view as a shorter focal length. That takes longer to capture, but you’ll end up with more resolution.

Decide on where your start and finish point for each row will be. I like to turn on the “rule of 3rds” grid on my camera’s display when possible, so I can make a mental note of where exactly the camera is pointed for the first frame. Alternatively, you can use the degree markings on your tripod head if you have them to note the starting point. Generally I like to shoot the bottom row first, panning in between each shot, and overlapping roughly 30% between frames (the rule of thirds overlay helps with this too). Once I finish the bottom row, I return to my first position, then tilt up (again overlapping by about 30%), and repeat the same number of frames for the second row. So on and so forth until I’ve captured the whole scene.

I have on occasion found myself in a position of wanting to shoot a multi-row pano but not having a tripod. You actually can do it handheld, it’s just that having a tripod dramatically increases your chances of successfully stitching things in post. But if you’re shooting a small handheld camera and able to maneuver yourself into a steady base from which to rotate the camera around, you can make it work in many cases.

Shooting handheld I got the shot. But with a tripod I could have bracketed and saved the detail in the sky.

There are a few pitfalls I’ll warn you about. It’s a great idea to shoot some “practice” multi-row panos in your backyard or whatever so you can get a successful pano or two under your belt before you try it on a more important scene.

Watch out for:

Depth of field issues. When in doubt, stop it down and just get everything in focus. Out of focus areas can confuse stitching software, and it’s not always easy to get one focus distance set correctly for an entire grid of exposures when you’re not seeing the completed image all at once during the shooting process. I’ve had more than one multi-row pano where I went home and found the frames containing only foreground looked good, but the frames with any background were fuzzy.
Make sure your exposures and white balance match each other! This isn’t the time to shoot in aperture priority or program auto. Like your focus, you’ll need to find an exposure that works for every frame in the scene - easier said than done in some cases. You can bracket multi-row panos, just know that it will cause more work in post. And don’t use AWB, since it will shift from frame to frame. If you’re shooting RAW, it doesn’t really matter what your white balance is as long as it’s the same on every frame. I rarely switch my camera’s white balance off of Sunny or Cloudy.
If you have entire frames that are basically just textureless space (like multiple frames that are nothing but pure blue sky), you’re probably going to have stitching issues. The software relies on being able to find unique and identifiable groups of pixels in the overlapping areas of the frames to match them up and align them with each other. Consider using a shorter focal length if necessary so each of your frames has at least one useful “landmark” to help guide the stitching software. Something to be aware of.
Shoot a bigger area than you plan to end up with in your final crop. A couple of extra frames to the left, right, top, and bottom gives you room to find the ideal crop later. This has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.

Once you have all your frames, get them onto the computer, and edit them separately before merging. Any serious exposure, white balance, contrast, etc. adjustments should be done while you’re still working with your RAWs. So once again you’ll need to find a group of settings that works for every frame. Edit one frame, and then apply those exact same settings to every frame in the group. Lightroom can easily do this automatically. The important thing here is to not lose image data in your editing - you can do dodging and burning, cropping, sharpening, and minor adjustments after stitching when you have the whole scene in front of you. But if you need to bring back some detail in the skies or the shadows, or clean up white balance, it’s best to do it before merging. Not all stitching software preserves the RAW data in the finished, stitched together image. Lightroom and Photoshop both have “Photomerge” features which will automatically stitch your pano for you. Different projections are available. Without getting too technical, I usually try for rectilinear first, and if it looks bad, I’ll try cylindrical, and if that looks bad, I’ll go to spherical. Each time I resort to a more flexible projection type, I usually end up cropping more and therefore losing more of my resolution and/or composition.

There are other, more specialized options for stitching software out there. PTGui is supposed to be the cream of the crop, but I haven’t used it because it’s not free, and Lightroom gets the job done for me 99% of the time. Hugin is a free version that is supposed to be quite good. I’ve tinkered with it a bit, but again… LR is fine for my uses, so I keep coming back to LR.

Once your stitching is complete, (which can take anywhere from a few seconds to several hours, depending on your camera, number of frames, and computer), crop in your stitched image to get rid of weird bendy edges and areas with only pure white pixels. From here you can more or less treat it like any other photo. If you did your job right before merging, you shouldn’t need to do any sweeping exposure adjustments. I usually bump in some contrast, then dodge and burn, fine-tune the white balance, clarity, saturation, and sharpening, and call it good.

Depending on how many frames you shot, you should now have a finished product with resolution ranging from “high” to “absurdly high”. Congrats!

Did you try this out? Or have you shot multi-row panos before? Share links to your photos in the comments for all to see!