The other day I talked about Elements 6 having improved Panorama stitching so I figured you’d need some tips for shooting pano pictures. If you haven’t tried shooting panorama photos please do it. It’s really quite simple as long as you follow a few guidelines. And if your P&S digital camera has a Panorama mode you’re halfway there.

Any digital camera can do panoramas. It’s the software that stitches the images together. Having a panorama mode just simplifies things a bit. The camera locks exposure, gives you guide lines on the LCD screen, and tags each image 1,2,3 so the software knows which order they go in.

For best panorama results, do the following:

• If available, use Manual exposure. Consistent exposure makes blending images easier.
• Don’t use Auto White Balance. Use the Daylight or Cloudy or other preset value.
• A superwide lens is not needed, and will actually create more problems for you when you try to stitch the images together.
• Shoot all the pictures vertically to include more foreground.
• Use a tripod and swing through the shot before actually photographing.
• Overlap images at least 30 percent. Give the software lots of room for shifting and tilting when blending the final image.
• If your camera has a Grid option in the viewfinder (many Nikon’s do) turn it on to help align the horizon.

Remember that you are creating a multi-mega-megapixel image. These can be printed quite large. I have a shot that’s five 6MP images stitched and it’s printed to 12×44 inches. Looks superb.