You are on holiday.
This wonderful vista spread out before you.
You want to take it home to show your friends and family.
You lift the camera to your eye...
and the camera just isn't wide enough.
There is nowhere you can point your camera so that it does justice to the beauty spread out in front of you.
What do you do? Put the camera away? Take a few mediocre shots that you'll be disappointed with every time you view them? Or maybe take a series of overlapping pictures intending to print them out and glue them together? This last one is your best solution, but did you know you can 'glue' your photographs together electronically in your computer to give a much neater result? However there are a few things you need to do to ensure the best quality result and invisible joins.
Firstly you need to find out if your camera has any manual exposure control.
If your camera has manual exposure then take a photograph of a typical part of the scene.
Note the exposure setting and then use this Exposure Value (EV) to set the exposure manually.
Next stand facing the centre of your panorama, twist horizontally to one end of your panorama, frame the view, and take a shot.
Now, without taking your eye from the viewfinder/screen, you need to twist from the hips to the next position.
Ensure you allow about a one-third overlap between frames.
The easy way to do this is to note a prominent landscape feature and ensure that this is still in the next frame.
Continue until you have completed all the shots you need.
If your camera does not have manual exposure it will almost certainly have an exposure lock (that bleep to confirm auto focus when you partly press the shutter usually also means the exposure is locked).
So again point the camera at a representative part of the scene.
Obtain exposure lock and then re-position the camera to take the first shot.
Come back to the same representative view, get exposure lock, and re-position for the second frame, and so on.
This is fiddly and far from ideal.
It is also quite difficult to make sure you get sufficient overlap because you have to keep moving away and remembering the details of the previous shot, so make sure you take plenty of images.
Unused ones can always be deleted, but a missing 100 pixels from a section of panorama are difficult to invent.
It is extremely important to obtain consistent exposure across the whole panorama (hence manual setting, or consistent exposure lock) because even a small exposure difference will result in colour differences in the final images that will impossible to hide and you'll find the sky looks particularly unrealistic in your finished image.
What you also need to watch out for is that you do not 'follow the horizon' with your camera to take in more interesting details.
The camera must follow as horizontal a path as possible.
Any vertical movement will need cropping out later and you can lose significant detail this way.
The only problem left is to join, technically known as stitching, the images together.
If you own a suitable digital camera, such as the Kodak V570, then this can be done in camera.
Otherwise many camera manufactures supply panoramic stitching software along with the camera, or available as a download from their web site.
And of course many of the excellent photo-editing software available has panorama stitching as an option.
Stitching software distorts images in order to make them fit.
It doesn't just join up the edges.
This is why you need a one-third overlap between images.
It minimises distortion and gives the software a much better chance of obtaining a good fit between adjacent images.