Merging Panoramas
How it was done

Making panoramas is all about merging - this image required a double dose by merging panoramas of two scenes.

Some photos are quick snaps.
Some take a long time behind the camera.
Some photos take a lot of waiting. 

• I had heard that a local field was going to be built on. In the Spring it was a mass of wild flowers.

• During the summer, I took seven pictures of the whole scene.
  These were joined before Photoshop Photomerge came along. 
  The shaping and repositioning had to be done with the Transform function.
• It worked quite well but as is often the case, when enlarged to giant size, some manual retouching was required.

The final result looked pleasing.

• Then it was a case of waiting for the bulldozers and builders to do their stuff. 
  In fact it was around three years before all the construction was finished, and the surrounding ground was cleared and covered with grass.
  

When doing a panorama of distant hills, it's simple enough to pan the camera. Closer subjects need a properly geared panoramic head, which pivots over the lens's nodal point. 
This page explains what that is: Nodal Point 

• The houses were close enough to require a panoramic head, otherwise getting a clean join becomes harder to achieve and more detail retouching over the joins is necessary.

• The two images then had to be joined. The houses were flipped vertically and lowered.
• A mask was put on the top image of the field and trees and a black brush was used to blend the join between the two.

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