As landscape photographers, we compose a lot of our photos as panoramas. They look great when printed big and hanging on a wall, but they make less of an impression when seen on a computer screen. What's the best way to display a pano to preserve its visual impact?
The short answer is, we don't know. But we're experimenting.
Panoramas are an attractive option for a landscape photographer because they can add information and context to a natural world that is often arrayed horizontally.
In this expansive forest, I could have made this photo as wide as I wanted, but if I used the conventional format of a digital camera, I would have had to include a lot of sky. Instead, I turned the cameral vertically and made 4 side-by-side exposures that were later "stitched" together in the computer to make this panorama. Photo: © Donald J. Rommes
Let's take a woodland scene as an example. If we wanted to give the viewer an appreciation for an expansive forest, we would include a large number of trees in the composition. But doing so in a traditional 2:3 format would, of necessity, include a lot of sky. Unfortunately, including the sky often adds no information about the forest while visually diminishing the importance of the trees.
Advantages of a panorama
To make the photograph a study of the forest itself, a panorama format may be useful by eliminating unnecessary information. For instance, a wide horizontal panorama—from the base of the trees to near their tops—can show a forest as a collective portrait of the individual trees comprising it. Since panoramas are often displayed as large images, the viewer can then appreciate the forest on two levels—as a collective whole, or as detailed study of an infinite number of individual trees and plants.
With digital cameras, panoramas are often created by "stitching" images together. To get the largest file size (and thus the potential for the largest photo) the camera is often turned vertically. Several overlapping exposures are then made, from left to right. The exposures are later merged in the computer to make one large, seamless file.
The issue with displaying panos on the computer is that while they may have the same vertical dimension as our "regular" photos, they appear shorter in order to fit the wider image on the screen. Clicking on the photo will take you to its location on the Iris Arts website. Photo: © Donald J. Rommes
Panoramas look small when displayed on a computer screen
Large files make large photos, but when panos are displayed on a relatively small computer screen of phone they look small—short and wide—even though they are often much larger files. So, how best to display them?
In our website, we try to use up as much screen real estate as possible. Even so, a panorama with a ratio of 2.5:1 or 3:1 looks small.
On social media, panoramas look even smaller (less tall) when displayed conventionally.
In an attempt to give our panoramas the impact we feel they deserve, we will be trying a couple of techniques on our business Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/art.for.healthcare/
How can we give our panos more impact on social media?
The first technique will be to present our panos in Instagram Stories. We will use that 15 second window to pan across a wide photo. The height will be 1080p, but the width will be the entire pano (2-3 times as wide as the height).
The second technique is more conventional. We will "slice" our panos in 2-3 and upload the consecutive slices on one post. Hopefully, the viewer will know to swipe the whole image to see the entire pano.
Will either technique be satisfactory? We don't know, but hope to learn from our trials and will report back with what we learned.
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