How to: Panorama of the Ötztaler Alps with Similaun Peak in its center

I like panoramic images, so shooting them in alpine environments has some challenges:

• Usually I do not carry a tripod, simply because of weight,
• Up to now I shot panoramic images during short rests during ascend or descend to any peak or hut,
• Some foreign particles like fluff balls, fibres or simply little spots from water or dirt generated spots on the lens.

Shooting without a tripod and a panoramic head makes it more difficult to generate the raw material for a panoramic image. Nevertheless it can be overcome with careful movements and observations through the viewfinder. In most cases I shoot in portrait mode, which allows a wider coverage in the vertical and shoot from left to right.

I try to stay firm on a spot and first have a look on the coverage of the scene to see what I can get onto the image. It’s also important to stay calm and wait a few seconds while preparing triggering the shot as well as actually shoot it. This should avoid shaking. You can also hold your breath, a technique used when shooting a rifle, to meet your target.

I usually overlap the individual images by up to approx. 40% – 50%. You might argue that this much is not necessary and you are maybe right here. But please keep in mind, that shooting a panoramic image hand-held is a much more difficult task. So I think it’s simply a bit safer.

The image below was composed of 6 individual raw images in portrait mode. I started from the left and tried to be steady in my movement, keeping as still as possible when pushing the trigger. Before I started shooting, I checked the frames over the complete range to be covered while looking through the viewfinder. I set my focus using the autofocus feature and after that switched over to manual. Beside having set the exposure to +2/3 because of the white snow, I did not have any special adjustments. The aperture was set to f/11 to achieve the star. Only then I started to take the individual images.

Panorama of the OÌetztaler Alps with the Similaun peak in the center.

Coming back home all images of course first need to be imported into my image database. For this Use Apple’s Aperture 3, which totally suits my needs and will for a long time to come.

Only at home I observed that dirt spots and a nasty piece of fiber from a cloth or so was on each image. Especially the piece of fibre could be seen multiple times on the first panoramic image I generated. Luckily Aperture includes a retouch feature, which came in very handy. With a brush I was able to remove the obstacles and the result was very satisfying. Additionally I removed some lens flare around the sun and only left the “Orbiting Star Ship” as well as a few stripes of airplanes. For this only the brush size needed to be set. While all obstacles were located in the sky area, I was able to be generous with the brush’s size. As a result I got 6 new working copies, which I exported as full-size 16-bit TIFF files to a local folder. I would recommend to remove all the dust before generating a TIFF panoramic image. My first ry was to remove the obstacles on the generated panoramic TIFF image, which I imported into Aperture. It was dead slow… or I was not patience enough. No, it really was slow, but hey, I worked with a 450MB image, probably no wonder…

My panoramic program of choice is Hugin, an open source program, which runs on various operating systems. It has no problem with this amount and size of images, though it seems to reduce size while processing it. Before generating the final panoramic image I cross check in the very last tab the size of the image and mostly request to maximize it. File sizes vary, but with the raw resolution of my 5D MkII the final size will be approx. 450MB. Thanks you inventors for big size hard discs!

I am quite happy with the panoramic image, I learnt something new of Aperture (retouch feature) and I also saw an improvement on how to shoot a panoramic image handheld. Last year in January, I messed up some nice views, because I wanted to shoot them faster. But I guess taking images is about taking your time, slowing down to achieve the result you want. I will keep it in my mind.

Several more panoramic images I took during that one week of snowshoeing through the Ötztaler Alps and some of the much bigger ones still need to be processed.

The image was also uploaded to

• Google+
• Flickr
• 500px