This involves taking a series of pictures as you turn the camera through an arc, then fitting the results together to make one long panorama. To do that with a film camera, it is almost essential that you use a tripod to keep each image at the level of its predecessor, and to ensure that the camera is kept perfectly straight. It’s a lot easier with a digital camera.

Pick a suitable scene, which would benefit from being shot as a panorama. Within that scene, choose what should be the principal subject, face it directly and adjust your position or zoom lens so that it is framed the way you want it. Then, doing your best to keep the camera at a constant level, twist your body to the left and shoot, making a metal note of an area on the right of the picture, about a quarter of the way in. Now move back towards the centre, taking another picture so the point you were looking at previously on the right, now fills part of the left of the frame. Take another picture, and continue doing that until you have completed the panorama.



You can use the camera in the conventional way horizontally, or turn it vertically to give more height to the image, in which case, the reduced width of the individual images will mean taking more pictures. You can even turn through a complete circle to make a 360-degree panorama.

Most digital stitching software works the same way. You drop your images into a window on the screen, click a button and the software joins them seamlessly, but the first image usually looks something like this.



It then needs to be cropped to look like this


Turning in a complete 360 degree circle gives an even wider picture, like this...