An Ode to Panoramas

Earlier this year, I co-lead a few photography tours in Nepal, Bhutan and Hokkaido, Japan. While traveling for five weeks with my FUJIFILM GFX cameras I really embraced the 65 x 24 panorama crop mode which creates a classic panorama aspect ratio. The GFX cameras can capture images in this aspect ratio in the Raw + Jpeg mode which outputs both a raw image with the 65 x 24 crop and of course a similar jpeg. The beauty of this crop mode in the GFX cameras is that the camera still captures the entire 4 x 3 image but the image shows up in Adobe Lightroom Classic with the crop applied–as you saw it through the camera’s viewfinder. Hence, when you get back and download the images, at any point you can go in and remove the crop or tweak it ever so slightly if you didn’t quite get the composition right in camera.

I love the 65 x 24 panorama aspect ratio. The images just have an elegance to them when using this aspect ratio–similar to some of my favorite movies that use a panorama aspect ratio. As a working pro, I would never use this mode on an assignment unless specifically asked for by the client. An aspect ratio like this drastically limits what any client could do with the images. But on this excursion I was co-leading two different photography tours and there was no specific end-use for these images. I was there to help guide the participants in how I saw the scene and what I might do to create interesting images of that scene. Hence, I had the freedom to choose a different aspect ratio and many of the participants on these trips had similar cameras (Hasselblad or Fujifilm medium format cameras for the most part) that allowed them to choose a panoramic aspect ratio as well. In Nepal and Bhutan, I was working with my good friend Andy Biggs, who had a brand new Hasselblad X2D II with him that can capture images in a similar manner with the same aspect ratio. We were both feeling the panorama aesthetic and often talked about how a scene or a composition felt panoramic more than the standard 4 x 3 aspect ratio both of our cameras normally produce. In Hokkaido, I was co-leading another photography tour alongside my dear friend George Nobechi, who was also working with a FUJIFILM GFX100RF camera that has a similar panorama crop option.

On this five week trip, I created more panorama images than I have ever created before. The fact that the cameras I took with me had massive amounts of resolution also made me feel like I wasn’t giving up too much in terms of image quality. With a lower resolution sensor, cropping to a 65 x 24 aspect ration would mean committing to a much lower resolution final image, but with 102 megapixel sensor in the GFX cameras that resulted in a 50.1 MP final image. And using Adobe Super Resolution to upres the image I can resize the image to a whopping 200 MP easily with little to no image quality loss. Hence, these panoramas can be blown up to enormous print sizes if needed.

I have used this panoramic aspect ratio built into my GFX cameras in the past but it was while we were in Pokhara, Nepal that it felt like 65 x 24 was the right aspect ratio. We were staying at the Tiger Mountain Pokhara Lodge just outside of Pokhara, Nepal and on the back patio you had this epic view of Annapurna (8,091 m, 26,545 ft) and Machapuchare (6,993m/22,943ft) rising above the foothills as shown below. This long stretched out view of the Annapurna range was tailor made for a panorama. Hence, a lot of us on the trip who had cameras that could accommodate this option switched our cameras over to the 65 x 24 mode. I didn’t take that many panoramic images in Nepal but the few scenarios where I tried it out really worked well.

With my smaller format cameras–i.e. full frame 35mm sensors–instead of creating a panorama by cropping the image I typically capture multiple images and then stitch them together after the fact in Lightroom. With this technique I can’t really tell how the final image will look or even what the final composition will be. And sometimes, if I am not careful, the stitched image may not come together as well as I had hoped. I have had vignetting foil some stitched panoramas–and it is very hard to tell if that will be an issue while capturing the images to build the panorama later on. Other times the composition just wasn’t that great after putting it all together. The upshot is that stitching together panoramas can work well but it is much nicer to see the finished panorama in camera as you are composing the image–and to be able to make adjustments to the composition as you frame up the image.

Beyond the technical aspects of how the camera could create the panorama, seeing the world through a long rectangular box just made sense for so many scenes. The 65 x 24 aspect ratio seems to give landscapes room to breathe. The images feel more expansive than the normal 4 x 3 aspect ratio. In my experience, they just have a feeling of elegance. All of my feelings about panoramas might just be because I have literally seen thousands of movies using similar aspect ratios.

When we got to Bhutan, there were a lot of scenes where the panorama made sense–and also cleaned up foreground elements to make the final image stronger. I found myself starting to look for panoramas instead of just forcing the issue. My eye was being drawn to them. And the good news is that it was very easy to switch over to panorama mode just by changing my cameras settings from capturing raw images only to capturing raw + jpeg. I had the aspect ratio for my jpegs set up for 65 x 24 so changing this one setting to capture both raw and jpeg images automatically changed the aspect ratio for the raw images as well. I had both the GFX100S and the GFX100 II with me so I would often have one set up specifically for panoramas and the other for the standard 4 x 3 format. Below are a few images from Bhutan captured using the 65 x 24 aspect ratio.

When I got to Japan, I leaned into the panoramas even more so than I did in Nepal and Bhutan. I admit that this might have been influenced by the fact that most of the participants had a FUJIFILM GFX100RF camera that also has an aspect ratio dial on the back of the camera, which makes it very easy to switch to the panorama mode. Hence, because the participants were experimenting with all kinds of different aspect ratios I found myself also experimenting a bit–and mostly choosing the 65 x 24 panorama mode.

As can be seen below, I captured a lot of panoramas in Hokkaido, Japan. I was thinking about panoramas for that entire trip and looked for opportunities to make cool pano images. We visited a lot of aquariums as can be seen in the a few of the images below. Aquariums are a natural fit for pano images–or at least the ones we found in Hokkaido–because of the long rectangular windows you end up looking though.

Even in situations where I would not have chosen a panoramic style image in the past I found myself staying in the 65 x 24 aspect ratio as a way to test out my composition skills and experiment with the new format. One of the best images from my entire five weeks of travel is the black and white image below. This stormy scene of of a sea stack just off the coast of Hokkaido (south of Sapporo) works because of all the fresh snow falling and blowing around and also because of the many birds flying over the ocean. This image needs to be seen large to really get the full impact of the image–and I find that is the case with many pano images. Hopefully here in this blog post the images show up large enough so that the reader can at least get some sense of what is going on.

As we kept driving around Hokkaido, it seemed like at every turn there was yet another scene that could be improved using the panorama mode. In many cases I could just fit the aspect ratio to the landscape or to the scene that was in front of me. And it was fun. Looking for panoramas was not new to me but doing so with an in-camera crop in this manner was not something I have done a lot of in the past given that I am normally creating images for clients. As can be seen below, I created a lot of panorama images in Japan. Below are some of my favorites from that trip.

Sadly, panorama images are not so easy to share on social media. The small format of your phone or even the web does not really do them justice. Sure, you can chop them up into three panel images that you swipe right to see the image details but that just doesn’t have the same impact as seeing the image printed large and hanging on a wall. Panoramic images really are meant to be printed. I will certainly make some large prints of a few of these images–just to see how they feel.

Maybe one day I will have a client that wants panorama images–I have had it happen in the past a few times. Most clients asking for panorama images are looking for ultra-high resolution images that will be put up on giant walls in office buildings and they want the image to span 50 feet (15 meters) or more in the entrance way.

I am not sure if this excitement about panoramas is the start of a new personal photo project but I can certainly see myself going back to locations I have photographed before with a new way of photographing those landscapes. Even for action and adventure images I can see creating some panoramas just to make something different–for myself if nothing else. One of the main reasons I still teach photo workshops and lead photo tours is to expand my own horizons. Panoramas aren’t anything new really but immersing myself into that way of thinking can open up new creative pathways–even if a client never asks for anything like this.