How to Create Perfect Panoramas With Tilt-Shift lenses

Creating panoramic photographs is nothing new; most of us have either had a crack with a camera or maybe even with a phone app/camera. A lot of my work involves creating panoramic/stitched-together photographs with a tilt-shift lens, which in my opinion is the best way to do so. 

As a hardcore Capture One advocate, this is a task that I still jump into Lightroom for, as it is much easier to do. Three clicks of a button and your images will be magically merged in Photoshop and returned to you as a neat and tidy digital negative in your Lightroom catalog. It is one of the greatest additions that Lightroom has made for me. I also often have had to make HDR images into panoramic stitched photographs, and the tool for the HDR works in a very similar way. 

There are a few reasons to want to stitch photographs together, the obvious being to create a large and wide panoramic image. Alongside this, there are the reasons that I use tilt-shift lenses to create panoramic. The main two reasons for me are as follows:

Creating a medium format look and resolution. Yes, I am too poor to run around daily with a 100-megapixel back, but I can afford a tilt-shift lens. The image below is the sum of three 50-megapixel images stitched together. I even managed to make it work with a person in the shot!

The second reason is usually created by unreasonable clients who want me to shoot on location where the ceilings are too low to create their monstrous flat lays. In these instances, I opt for a wider tilt-shift lens, and I shift it left and right to get everything into the frame before merging them in Lightroom. 

Scott Choucino's picture

Food Photographer from the UK. Not at all tech savvy and knows very little about gear news and rumours.

Log in or register to post comments
9 Comments

I used to shoot landscapes with this technique, together with an Agnos Jumbo MultiBigShoot bracket, which mounts the lens on your tripod so the camera moves. This way you don't have parallax problems etc. and can use the technique even in macro.

Id never even heard of one of those! Learn something new every day :D

You will love it :-) Not sure it is available for the Canon TS lenses. I modified mine with a lower bracket than stock, for a more sturdy setup and easier fitting in the bag.

That would be ideal for my food work!

Hey Scott, if you use the 17mm, 24mm or new 50mm from Canon, check out the TS-E Frames from Rogeti.

I bought the one for my 24mm 2 weeks ago and it's one fine piece of machining : http://bit.ly/31VOudX

That's might even be a better solution, seems to be very well designed! And as far as I could find, de Agnos is Nikon only.

Better off with the Rogeti frame or TS lenses with a built-in arca swiss foot. :-)

The ppi resolution only affects (for the most part) how the image is printed. ... I assume you meant the three shot stack will print larger but the image resolution still remains native to the sensor you shot it with. Unless of course you make a 4-6 shot image at each sticking position which would of course result in the higher resolution image.

Scott do you have to make exposure corrections for the two "outside" images to account for the vignetting/exposure reduction from the shift? Or does Photoshop's Merge command take that into account?