Panoramic.

For this small project we are asked to create a panoramic with a narrative behind it that we would need to stitch together on Photoshop, whether done automatically or manually.

Examples of Panoramic Photographs:

Five Revolutionary Seconds XI, by Sam Taylor Wood.

Sam Taylor Wood creates her panoramic images using a special camera which creates a 360° panoramic photograph in one continuous shot with a 5 second exposure.Taylor Wood likes to use this technique of panoramic to capture the whole environment she is shooting, & to capture everything happening within that environment.

Belfast, by Johannes Hepp.

Johannes Hepp shoots his panoramics to show daily routine, usually in areas which have been effected by terrorism. In the photo above we can see that this panoramic is taken of children playing in their neighbourhood, it kind of shows it as new & old in this area, as there are newer looking homes on the right & left sides of the image, then in the background we can see more older looking houses, & an area that could have been houses that has been demolished & flattened.

Apollo, by Kahn & Selesnick.

Kahn & Selesnick's panoramics are not at all like the ones above, they create more imaginative panoramics that are completely out of the ordinary. The photo above shows a strange moon landscape with a variety of characters, including a dog & an elephant in space suits. This is not even the complete panorama, the complete one shows even more including space & the Earth.

Image File Formats: 

 JPEG: JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group) is the most commonly used image file format, nearly every camera is able to shoot photo onto JPEG format. However JPEG compression is lossy, meaning that the more the image is used the more data from the image it will lost from it, which can lead to the image becoming pixelated. It's usually not recomended to print from JPEG files.
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TIFF: TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) image files are like JPEG's but can be saved & compress photos from Photoshop in a lot higher quality but does take up a lot of space.
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RAW: RAW is one of the top recomened file formats to have your camera set at, it captures the image you photograph in the highish quality & has a very high loseless compression on files. RAW files are generally a lot smaller than saved TIFF images, but do need to be converted as they are not processed to be edited.

Making the Panoramic:
To create the full panoramic first a series of images are needed before they can be stitched together on Photoshop, this is usually done using a tripod & taking the series of images in a 180° or 360° sweep of the place you want to take the panoramic of. For my final & practice panoramics I did both 180° & 360° shots but I did not use a tripod.

Creating a New Panorama.

To create a new panoramic photo out of your series of image you click File > New > Photomerge Panorama, this is the method on Photoshop Elements 9 (on CS5 it is File > Automate > Photomerge), which then lead to this:

Adding Images for Panorama.

There are several options you can use to create a panoramic from here, for all of mine I used Cylindrical, because I did not want my image to look straight, wanting to give it the full 180°/360° feel to it.

Stitched but Un-Cropped Result.

The result after stitching is this, as we can see it needs to be cropped down into a straigh rectangle to be a complete panoramic.
Practice Panoramas:

Creating 360° Panoramas/Planets:

The first thing needed to do to create a 360° panorama, you need to adjust the image size so that the image is square, for this you need to unclick the constrain proportions on the image resize & make the width the same as the height of the image.

Then after that the image needs to be rotated by 180° so that the image is upsidedown.

When rotated its finally time to make the image into a 360° panorama, to do this you need to go to Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates, which will leave you with your final image.

 The best results for create 360° is too make sure that the top corners of the image are the same-ish colour, like the sky for example & that also the bottom quarter-half of the photo is the same texture (for example something like grass). You could also try not rotating the image 180°, as this gets some interesting results too.

Final Panoramic:

 The narrative behind this photo is based upon events that we here in the news every so often to do with teenage gangs & violence, so I went for a teenager just after they've been attacked by an enemy (not litterally, obviously), in this day & age these such events can be caused by rival gangs in schools etc. On the right hand side of the image we can see a figure lying down on the ground dying from blood loss & on the left hand side we can see a figure in the far distance, looking back towards the victim. To make it look a little more real I used water to try & create a blood trail leading from my model, which I had later planned on turning red to be more blood-like in Photoshop, however I was happy with the way it looked without editing. Also in terms of editing this as my final panorama, I increased the contrast slightly & also decreased the saturation of the photo. Since I've made this panoramic I have noticed some area that are not joined up directly, but they are not that noticable. My location for this photo is in a tunnel that goes underneath a main road near where I live in Hove, its a fairly isolated place on most occasions, so it seemed the perfect place to stage a murder or attack. This photo was taken in the morning, which has given a very nice effect of shear white light at one end of the tunnel, which to me makes it look like a little like a gateway to where we go after we die.