The first time I ever used a panoramic camera was on my trip to Mexico in 1997. I purchased one of those 35mm disposable cameras and shot the whole roll while I was down there. When the pictures were developed, I was quite happy with how the panoramic format created a more grandiose landscape, but I was equally appalled at the poor image quality!

I learned, then, that 35mm panoramic photographs are simply cropped photos. Ever since, I’ve been wary of panoramic cameras. Why buy something “special” that will degrade the quality of your images when you could simply crop 35mm photos yourself?

My search for the perfect panoramic camera wasn’t solved when I bought my Canon Powershot s30. No matter what anyone tells you, a 3-MegaPixel camera just does not have the resolution necessary to yield good panoramic prints. Of course, that didn’t stop me from taking this picture one.

The great thing about using digital cameras is that it’s so easy to work with the photos after taking them. One winter day, I had the idea of tilting my camera sideways and taking multiple overlapping images. Later, I thought, I might be able to stitch the pictures with Photoshop into one, seamless photograph. I figured that the best time to do it would be in the summer, but I was itching to try it out. Luckily, my wife encouraged me to make a day of it and we bundled up and headed for the Mendenhall Glacier.

Once there, I set up my crummy tripod out on the frozen lake. Being a videographer’s tripod, it had no portrait/landscape lever on it, so I was forced to use masking tape to weld my camera upright on the tripod. With my rapidly-freezing fingers, I leveled the legs as best I could on the uneven snow and proceeded to take 13 pictures, left to right, just before the next passerby stumbled into my foreground.

When we got home I loaded the images into Photoshop and immediately set to work on what I considered to be a test run. The lineup was far from perfect: The horizon line curved upward on each end like a mocking smiley face, huge holes gaped in the edges of the snowy footpaths, one boundary lacked sufficient overlap, and the even tones of the blue sky were anything but. Still, it seemed doable, so I kept the 160MB image in memory and set to work with the cloning stamp, eraser, and filters.

Low and behold, what I thought would only be a test picture turned out to be a pretty great photograph. Better yet, the stitching allowed me to add up the photos’ resolution to a respectable, large-format printable, 9776 x 1942 pixel image! I was so happy with the results that I never did go out and get that summer panorama.

But now that I’m thinking about it again…