The Unlikely Pano Subject - Wildlife!

A three image stitch of a crash of white Rhinos on a reserve near Etosha in Namibia. I leaned down out of the vehicle to get as low an angle of possible, using the flipped up LCD screen to compose - 28mm on a 24-70mm lens.

For a very long time I have been a firm advocate for panoramic photography. I have always enjoyed the widescreen type of view that a panoramic image offers, possibly a result of cutting my teeth on wide screen movies in my youth. By widescreen I am referring to what the film industry has dubbed ‘CinemaScope’. This is an aspect ratio of 2,39:1 (sometimes rounded to 2,4:1). This is even wider than the standard definition of a panoramic image which is any image where the long side is more than double the shirt side in length. Technically widescreen as we associate it with digital - being 16:9 - is actually just under where panoramic is considered to start. At any rate, CinemaScope is meant to create an expansive, immersive view for the cinema-goer. Highly acclaimed cinematic films such as Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’, Ridley Scott’s ‘Gladiator’, and Christopher Nolan’s ‘Inception’ were all filmed and projected for the the 2,39:1 ratio. The cinematographer Bill Pope used the extra-wide canvas to particular effect for the bullet time sequences in ‘The Matrix’. 

The secret visual success of panoramic images on the viewer is the ability to give a wider contextual view while at the very same time focusing in on a close-up subject. It feels more three dimensional and realistic, despite being a two dimensional image. Certainly you can get the same effect simply by composing artfully in other formats. Charlie Waite is synonymous with the square format in landscape photography and his images also allow for visual dimensional interplay of close and far at the same time. In fact, most successful landscape photography requires a careful arrangement of visual elements so that the viewer can infer visual depth in the image - thereby imaging the scene as if they were there in person. Panoramic just seems to be able to do this so much more effectively in my opinion (of course some photographers would say I’m just being lazy…they could be right). 

Waterbuck at dusk on the Umfolozi River - handheld three images stitch using a 300mm f4 with 1.4 teleconverter.

So what about applying it to wildlife photography? I am not exactly a wildlife photographer by definition. I find that I am far more likely to be staring behind a tripod on top a mountain, than staring down an enormous telephoto lens at an animal of some description. As it is, my ‘wildlife’ lens up until recently has been an aging and fungus riddled manual focus Nikkor 400mm f3.5 lens. On occasion I have had access to a colleague's 200-500mm f5,6 (a Jekyll and Hyde lens of note), but have basically had glass reserved for landscape and the commercial work that I shoot. So, up close and personal portraits and even tight wildlife action is something that is quite difficult to capture. 

This year has come with a few surprising changes to the usual subject matter that I photograph (outside of commercial work of course); that being landscapes. Suddenly I have found myself photographing rhinos in Namibia, Elephants in Kwazulu-Natal, and I am heading off to Uganda next month to photograph gorillas and chimps. Instinctively I have fallen back on my love of panoramic and am creating images of wildlife in context, as panoramic, or widescreen images. 

An example of an image where it was simply cropped top and bottom. It still works, but certainly doesn't have the up-scalability that a stitched pano would have.

Of course you can turn any image into a panoramic image simply by cropping the top and bottom of the frame until you have the requisite 2:1 ratio or greater. This isn’t a particularly good idea with a lot of wildlife photography as you then suffer reduced resolution on an image that is quite possibly shot on a higher ISO to start with. 

This is where the marvels of modern editing come in. Ten years ago, stitching a handheld panoramic image shot with a moderately (or even long) lens would have resulted in some rather interesting artefacts. Now, where it’s AI or just much improved algorithms (probably the latter as you don’t need to be connected to the internet), it is possible to shoot quite wild movement from left to right and stitch the resultant images using your photo editor of choice into a decent panoramic image. 

A three-image panoramic stitch of an elephant near a road in KwaZulu-Natal's Umfolozi National Park - shot handheld using a 300mm f4 lens.

The same rules apply as for landscape photography when creating these handheld panoramic images: You need to shoot in manual so that aperture, shutter speed and ISO remain the same between images. Focus should probably also be in manual (or at the very least you are not refocusing between shots - yay for rear-button focus) so that there is no focus difference between the shots. Finally, there needs to be an overlap of a third of the frame between the images for a pano to be successfully stitched. More is better, but you don’t have to be ridiculous about it and shoot at tiny increments of change. 

Software has gotten good enough now that movement within the image is usually compensated for so that you don’t end up with a two-headed antelope. The results are then wide view scenes contextualising the animal in it’s landscape. I personally feel that this is longer-lens wide view is far more evocative and immersive for the viewer than simply using a wide-angle lens to photograph wildlife in the first place. One of the joys of this technique is also the realisation that you don’t need a massive lens to photograph wildlife because it is about placing the subject in it’s environment, rather than completely filling the frame with it.