Huntington Beach Panorama

The Shooting Process

Here's how I pulled the shot off.

1. I placed the camera into Aperture-priority mode because I needed a little automatic assistance to deal with the quick panning. I knew that Photoshop could handle any subtle shifts when it blended.

2. I set the camera to Raw to have much greater flexibility in exposure and tone.

3. I squared my body to face the most interesting part of the action.

4. I planted my feet about shoulder width apart and twisted at the waist.

5. I shot two exposures for each position (to deal with moving subjects).

6. I tried to pan my body smoothly and create about 50% overlap between exposures to avoid issues with people being accidentally cut off by movement.

The Shooting Process

Here's how I completed the post. I used several features in Photoshop to get the job done.

• Ran the Photomerge command. Slightly dissatisfied with first results so ran it again (each time is a little different).

• Adjusted the layer masks to clean up the blending of fast-moving objects.

• Used Cloning, the Patch tool and Content Aware Fill to remove blemishes.

• Popped Color with Vibrance

• Controlled tone with Curves.

• Used a Gradient Fill Layer and Photo Filter Layer to pop the sky.

• Cropped to improve composition.

• Performed Grayscale Toning.

• Used Blending Modes and Blend If command.

• Here's the walk-through.

• What sort of tutorials do you want to see next?