Ever wish you could fit everything you saw into a snapshot you were taking? Panoramic shots—photos that give you a wide-angle view of the scene being shot—used to require either a fish-eye lens or a special panoramic camera. But thanks to digital cameras, cheap camera memory, and photo editing software, you don't need special equipment to capture the big picture anymore. Many software tools will automatically "stitch" photos together for you, finding where they overlap and matching them up into a single, editable picture. And you may already have some of them on your PC.
For example, Windows 7's Windows Live Photo Gallery has a panoramic photo feature that requires hardly any effort at all. Just select multiple photos from Photo Gallery's viewer by holding down the 'shift' key and selecting them with the mouse as a group, and then click on the "Make" menu and select "Create panoramic photo".
The software will then automatically match up where each photo goes and create a complete picture from them all, which you can then crop and straighten to eliminate the black areas where there was no picture to match up (as shown in the screenshot with this story).
I used a series of 20 photos that I took during last year's Baltimore "Snowpocalypse" and ran them through Windows Live Photo Gallery's panoramic feature on my aging Toshiba laptop, and the results were pretty impressive.
Another free alternative for doing panorama stitching is Hugin, an open-source photo panorama and mosaic tool for Mac, Windows and Linux. Hugin can deal with a number of input options, including multiple rows of photos—even when the number of photos in each row is different. And it handles it automatically. Did I mention it's free?
Then there's Adobe Photoshop Elements 9's Photomerge tool, an automated part of the $99 photo editing software package. For photo hobbyists I took a series of 30 shots I took in a 360-degree arc at maximum resolution and opened them with the Photomerge tool, and it produced a final product that I could print out as a canvas that stretches all the way around my living room without losing any resolution.
Photoshop Express' Photomerge gives you the choice of either allowing the software to automatically choose how to stitch images together, or picking from two different stitching approaches: "perspective", which designates one of the images as the reference image for the set and adjusts the other images in an attempt to preserve the perspective of the final picture; or "cylindrical", which pieces the photos together like sections of a 360-degree shot in an attempt to avoid the "bow-tie" effect of stretching images at either end to make them match perspective. You can also select to have Photoshop Elements try to fill in the parts of the picture that aren't covered by the photos.