We are excited to announce the release of our latest ebook, Hudson Henry’s Panoramas Made Simple. Hudson has a deep passion for panoramic photography, a legacy that goes back to the days of film, when he worked to translate his vision of the landscape in front of him into large digital print. Since then, Hudson has become a master of the panorama, and in this book, he shows you how easy it is to ditch your camera’s ‘auto’ mode and create stunningly beautiful panoramas that capture the grandeur of our world—and without needing to buy special pano gear:
The first panoramic photograph I remember seeing was a series of overlapping Kodak prints that my cousin laid out on his kitchen table to show the incredible view from atop a peak in the Pacific Northwest. I was amazed at the scale of the combined scene: it was big, with an ultra-wide angle, and highly detailed. Today, with the advent of digital cameras and sophisticated editing software, we can leave the kitchen table behind and easily merge individual digital photographs into high-quality, seamless panoramic mergers.
You don’t have to invest a lot of money in gear to create panoramas. You can begin using the simple panoramic techniques I cover in this book without purchasing any specialty camera gear whatsoever. If you have a decent tripod, that will help, but you can also create shockingly good panoramas without one. With some care, you can even capture surprisingly good panoramas with nothing but a smartphone.
Panoramas Made Simple is richly illustrated with gorgeous examples of Hudson’s panoramas, and includes helpful tips on shooting in the field, as well as the best ways to assemble your panoramas on your computer (with Adobe Lightroom Classic, Photoshop or ON1 Photo RAW).
The book is available now in the CDP bookstore as a free download.
Click the gallery below to see the introductory chapter, or you can download a sample PDF of the introduction and the first chapter free via this link.
One of the most common mistakes I see in photo classes is that students don’t shoot enough. I don’t mean that they don’t spend enough hours out taking pictures, I mean that when they see a potential subject they don’t shoot enough frames of it. Many people have the mistaken idea that a good photographer walks into a situation, sees their subject, determines how best to shoot it, takes the final shot, and then goes home to wait for that image to appear on the cover of a magazine. Alas, this isn’t true. To get good results, you have to shoot a lot of frames of your subject. This process of working your subject can be a difficult one for some people to learn, but here’s an example of what I’m talking about.