You can take multiple photos of a scene and splice them together with software to create a panoramic image. There is a QSA stitching tutorial that describes the process in Photoshop step-by-step. The steps are easy and usually the process goes without a hitch.

A very weeks ago we drove over to Half Moon Bay. Half Moon Bay (map) is a town on the coast about 30 miles south of San Francisco. In the summertime the coast stays cool while things heat up only ten or twenty miles inland, so it is a favorite retreat.

We stopped at Dunes Beach, which if one of four beaches that comprise Half Moon Bay State Park. I took the following two pictures to splice together into a vertical image:

These images show advantages and disadvantages of splicing. Notice that the exposures are different in the two images. You can see the difference in the sand area, where the sand in the bottom image is overexposed to the point where detail is lost. The reason the sand is overexposed is that the dark vegetation on top of the bluff is properly exposed. A fancier camera with more dynamic range would have preserved the detail, but I still would have needed two images to cover the large field of view. Some suggest that the exposure be locked to the average, but I think that most often loses more than it gains.

The automatic focus has adjusted for the far and near distances in the two photos. That is a significant advantage of the technique of vertical splicing. It automatically makes a picture that is in focus from very near to far.

When I first did the splicing in Photoshop, there was a distracting change in brightness marked by a diagonal transition line across the beach. My first attempt to fix it was to darken the beach, but that failed because the texture of the beach still disappeared. The over exposure had lost the detail. After doing the best I could with adjusting the exposures to match, I spliced the images and added the step of painting the texture back in using Photoshop’s cloning tool. The result is:

Notice that the ground cover gets darker near the upper portion of the image of the near bluff. That is a defect in my splicing of the differing exposures. You can also see some difference in the sand exposure. I’m betting most people will overlook these.

The red and green plant in the foreground is ice plant, so named because it feels cool on a warm day. It is a common feature of the California coast, and helpful to photographers looking for some color in an otherwise blue and tan scene. Varieties of ice plant have yellow or purple flowers.

As with many panoramas, many details are lost when the image is small. There is a heron and some pelicans in the group of birds, but they look like punctuation marks on a web-sized image. It would do better as an 8” x 12”, or larger, print.