Vacation Panoramas

I guess these are cool. I desperately wanted to be able to capture the beauty of all of the wonderful places I explored while I was on vacation this summer, and the only way I could think of to do that in these particular areas was to create a panorama. I had no idea how to do it, but I figured there was some way to create one in photoshop, so with a steady hand I put my camera into drive mode and held the shutter down while sweeping (spraying) all of what I wanted to be in the photo, hoping that I would find a way to piece it into a pano later. When I finally got the laptop from Savannah, I remembered that I had taken these shots, and with a little help from google, I believe that I successfully created a few panoramas. I think these turned out okay, the top photo is my favorite because the sky is so pretty. Of course, the real view was breathtaking, but i think that these photos represent the real thing at least a little better than a plain old photograph would do. I wish i would've tried this with more of the things I saw. Of all the national parks I visited, I only took shots for a pano in Canyonlands. I should have taken some at arches as well, but to get to the breathtaking views there, I had to hike a ways and lets face it by the time I hiked all the way up to see an arch, the camera that should've been placed in my hand was booted out by a water bottle. Gotta stay hydrated to continue living, right? otherwise, I could've accidentally died and never gotten to put these panoramas into action so I think I did the right thing. But meh it would've been really nice to have a pano of arches..

Anyway, the settings I chose to take these photographs were fairly simple. I was outside in the middle of the day, so my ISO was somewhere around 100. My aperture wasn't seer too wide, since I was shooting a landscape photo and I wanted most of it to be in focus (foreground and background), and my shutter speed needed to be somewhat fast so that there wouldn't be any motion blur from me turning the camera while holding the shutter down. Really, this was a very simple process. All I had to do was find out how to put it together in photoshop, which was also fairly simple. All you have to do is open all of the images you want to merge in photoshop, then go to File>Automate>Photomerge, then select auto for the layout and select add open files and click ok and it does the rest of the work for you. 

WOOHOO PANORAMIC GENIUS