Panorama at Hạ Long Bay

If one photo says more than 1000 words… this panorama would say more than 11000 words!

This picture is in fact a stitched image of 11 separate pictures. The 11 shots were taken on the 22nd of December 2013 on a holiday to Hạ Long Bay in Vietnam.
What a location! Visiting Hạ Long Bay was one of the main reasons to go to Vietnam for me. Therefore I wanted to capture the moment as best as possible. And sometimes one picture in an overwhelming environment as this does no justice to the experience. Consequently, on a trip on a boat between the islands, I took the 11 pictures having in mind to stitch them together in post processing.

The challenge however with a panorama is that the individual pics need to be taken from a single stable position. At least, when you want to have a continuous foreground and sharp overlapping areas. Being on the boat was therefore not the best position. The solution was not to have the foreground in the picture and to have a distant horizon. A 50 mm lens would give me those settings. The boat was not going too fast and the environment forced me to take the pics without a real foreground plus a distant horizon (because of the sizes of the rock formations), so those were the ingredients to take my chances.

In post processing, the stitched image is a 51 megapixel picture. Having 11 pictures, all being 11 megapixel leads to an overlap of about 40 percent. This is also the best overlap you can have for making a panorama because of stitching. Also, the individual shots are taken in portrait mode, not landscape. Because a horizontal panorama will get wide, there is no use to shoot in landscape mode. Shooting in portrait mode gives eventually more footprint in the final composition. Of course, when shooting a vertical panorama, it is consequently relevant to shoot in landscape mode.

The result for me is impressive although for a panorama, 11 pictures might be too wide. Hence, other panorama’s will not be this wide anymore. However, it turned out to be a great impressive photo!

Camera settings:

Location