Say you are going on a long hike or a multiday trip to photograph places that are otherwise impossible to reach. You could carry large format gear or you can carry a small camera, such as a light-weight (D)SLR or even a compact camera.

The first is heavy and limits your throughput severely (some say that's a positive - the slow method), but the second limits the maximum print size that still looks good but allows you too shoot a lot and shoot quickly if the light changes. It also has all the benefits of digital capture and rapid editing using programs such as Lightroom.

As an illustrative example, last spring I went on a multiday hut skitrip in the Colorado Mountains. It would have been impossible to carry anything more than a single small body and single lens as we had to carry all our own food and beverages and sleep/emergency gear and still be able to ski. I decided to carry a simple 6 megapixel (MP) Nikon D50 with only the superlight kit lens. With this very basic gear, I still generated very high quality landscapes that can normally only be had using medium or large format gear or the very highest grade of DSLRs such as a Canon 1Ds mk III, or the mythical Nikon D3x.

Apart from the fact that I don't own a 20+ MP DSLR, both would have weighed many factors more. So how does one make a 20+ MP camera from a 6MP one? The answer is panoramic stitching of multiple images.

Usually panoramic stitching is done by stitching a horizontal row of images to get a wide all-around view. However a different method allows you to assemble a grid of images into a single high-res normal rectilinear image. Using this approach, you can generate a view that is equivalent to very wide-angle lenses even if all you have is a kit lens. Most methods that you will read about use special tripod heads that rotate the camera around the entrance nodal point, avoiding parallax effects, or tilt-shift lenses where you simply shift around the capture plane in a grid. Both are very expensive in general and not at all light.

An alternative is simply to ignore the parallax effects and use a simple tripod head. This works extraordinarily well in most cases and I do this often. However, you can go one step simpler if you do not have anything in your frame that is very close. I did not carry a tripod on my huttrip and it would have been completely useless anyway as there was virtually no place I could find that had snow shallow enough to use a tripod on. So I just shot rotating myself as much as I could around the camera and hoped for the best. It turns out that this almost always works fine. You'll have to touch up small problems in post but surprisingly good results can be obtained this way. In the following, I'll quickly explain the method which consists of two parts - A, the shooting and B, the assembly in computer and post.

You start by visualizing the composition that you want in your final assembled image and moving around until you have the right composition in front of you. You will want to mentally subdivide this into a grid of say 4 columns of 3 or 3 columns of 4 images. Make sure that if you have close objects in your envisioned frame that you attempt to get them in one of the shots entirely. Set the focal length of your camera so that you cover a field slightly (say 25%) larger than what you envisioned a single grid cell to be. Usually this will get you between 24 to 30mm on a crop body. Now set your exposure according to the normal rules using manual exposure mode. Use spot metering and the zone system, or just shoot a few images of the brightest and darkest parts and optimize your histogram so that you don't overexpose the brightest parts and still retain the shadows. Set your focus to manual (usually autofocus is not a good idea for this, but it depends on the situation). Lastly, I use RAW for this sort of work so that I don't have to worry about white balance. Then simply move your camera in a grid-like fashion from the top left to the bottom right (or however you do it), making sure you overlap images a sufficient amount.

This takes some practice. In certain situations, you can also use variable or autofocus and end up with an image that is sharp both in the foreground and the background as the camera will focus at different distances depending on whether you aim down or up to infinity. No tilt-shift needed! This was the easy part. Next is the slightly harder part which is assembly of the composite image.

Illustration 1. The developed images in Lightroom for a 3x3 grid of landscape images. This is a mountain called Gold Hill (about 12,400 ft), as seen from the Goodwin/Greene backcountry hut at sunrise. This year had so much snow that the hut was completely buried and I was standing on its roof. All images were shot handheld at ISO 200,1/320s, f/8 and 24 mm. The final assembled image will have the field-of-view equivalent to a 10 mm lens on the same crop body.

The assembly is done in external programs to Lightroom. Before assembling, you need to do some prep work. I usually select all the images to be assembled and move to the Develop module and turn on autosync. Here I set white balance, and do some exposure correction if needed and I usually zero out the rest of the development. When this is done, there are many methods of assembling the final image. One is to use the panoramic stitching tool in Photoshop. This tool is however, not very smart, and has very little control. It is however nicely integrated into Lightroom.

I normally use a dedicated panoramic stitching tool, both because of the added control and the higher final quality. I export 16-bit tiffs in prophotoRGB space and load those in the external tool. My tool of choice is called Hugin and is open source freeware. There are many others, such as PTgui, autopano, and PTMac. Hugin is by far the most flexible but because of this also the most difficult to learn. It doesn't matter how you do this, but in the end, you will end up with a big tiff file. This file needs to be edited considerably. You need to crop it so there are no lobes sticking out. You might need to touch up small stitching errors, or clone some parts to fill in holes when you did not do the grid of images just right. I use Photoshop to do this work. Then I usually take the image back into Lightroom and do some minor touchup such as brightness and contrast, curves work, color balance or graduated filters.

illustration 2. Assembled and edited panorama. This image has superb detail much better than a rather heavy D3x would have given and comparable to medium format film. I've made images of over 100MP this way which approaches large format film. The image also clearly illustrates the outstanding skiing that was to be enjoyed here.

I set up a little gallery of images I shot this way for you all to check out. Some of them were done using a tripod, but most were done handheld. I hope this inspires you to generate some great images using simple gear.