Click image for larger 2000px version - 4-shot panorama stitched together in Photoshop CS5This is almost a real-time weather report panorama image as just a few minutes ago this massive thunderstorm was approaching St. Petersburg, Florida from the east. In the time it took me to stitch it together and edit it in Photoshop it has began its pouring of a deluge of rain and striking of thunderbolts. The rain is much needed here and hopefully the storm will pass quickly so Kiki and I can still go to the dog park as usual in the evening and I can play in the weekly ultimate frisbee pickup game even later in the evening!
Making a panorama image like this is not difficult in Photoshop CS5. Using an 80-200mm lens, setting my exposure in manual mode, then locking in the focus, I took the four shots handheld using the gridlines in my Nikon D300's viewfinder to lineup the overlap needed between each shot. Then using the Photomerge feature in CS5 it was just a matter of choosing spherical in the settings and letting my MacBook Pro's CPU do the heavy lifting.