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As part of our week long winter sun break on Tenerife my wife Liz and I took a day's package trip to the much smaller island of La Gomera, about an hour long ferry ride from Tenerife's west coast.
Included in the trip was a coach tour around the island's beauty spots, taking in the volcanic landscapes and unusual (to say the least!) vegetation.
Now a coach tour isn't the most photography friendly way to experience a location, with just ten minute snapshot pauses at various, very lovely and dramatic, scenic viewpoints.
So I had to quickly decide how to handle these limited opportunities, capturing the lovely scenes laid out before me in the best possible way to allow for high quality reproduction later on when back home.
With no room or time to set up a tripod, I had two options for handheld shots.
Either I could use the widest end of my 24-105mm zoom and try and fit in as much of the scene as possible in a single frame, compromising the composition in so doing, or I could risk taking a handheld series of overlapping images, in the hope that Adobe Lightroom could make a decent panoramic stitch out of slightly wonkily aligned frames.
In for a penny...I chose the latter approach, managing to get a couple of rapid panoramic sweeps of around 120° in before we had to get back on the bus.
So I was holding my breath when I finally hit the 'merge to panorama' button in Lightroom, but I needn't have worried as the final stitch came out pretty much as I'd hoped, with just a small amount of warping required in Photoshop to get the proportions of the collage right.
It's just amazing how much artistic freedom working in digital gives you. I could never have done what I did in those precious ten minutes back in the 'good old days' of film!
Filename - la gomera panorama 03.jpg
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 35mm
Exposure - 1/80 sec @ f11, ISO200
Filters - Polarising filter used to darken the sky and enhance the colours
Location - La Gomera, Canary Islands
This image - 1200x557px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC
Comments - Panoramic image made by stitching multiple exposures
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