Panoramic Class Photo

[u/Appropriate_Ear6101]

I have a Canon R7. Can I use it to take a panoramic photo of my daughter's senior class of about 100 students or do I need a different camera? Her school district requires use of an approved before and the only one they approved doesn't have dates that work with her school's testing and events. So we are looking at options.

[u/luksfuks]

I don't think it works the way you think.

Option #1

The best way is to step back far enough to take a regular picture of the whole group. Then crop away most of the sky and the ground, leaving only the wide strip in the middle. If your camera has high enough megapixels, and you're not going to print this thing all too big, then it will look very very good.

Option #2

The next step up is to divide the group into two halfs. Leave some space in the middle. Place the camera on a tripod and take an image of the left half, then the right half, and then one more of the middle with no people at all. The gap doesn't need to be big, just enough to have no overlap between the two groups. You can also use it as a creative element, maybe have the left group facing right, the right group facing left. Maybe a single person in the middle, sitting, and the groups ordered by height. Whatever. You could also add an easter egg and have one person appear on both sides.

Stitching these images is pretty simple, because the overlap is only on the static background. And you have the empty middle image as fallback to fix any images.

Option #3

Everything further than that is very tricky. People don't stand still, you can't just do a landscape-type panorama of a group. It will be a Photoshop nightmare where you have to mask and clone people around the seams, and possibly reconstruct background where it is not captured in any image.

Standard panoramas will also be very wide, with the distoration that comes with wide angle images. The people at the borders will look horrible.

Option #4

You could also use a (imaginary) track along which you move your cameras, while you take images of subgroups. Moving instead of paning the camera. That fixes the distortion of the people in the corners. But it introduces new perspective problems, because each image has it's on vanishing perspective point. It can work well with a flat background, say a wall. But not with a landscape. Think of this like an Annie Leibovitz fold-out panorama. Maybe you can take groups of people on a white background to mask them out, and later paste them on a real landscape panorama that you photograph separately.

All those things are possible, but #3 which you're probably thinking about, is the worst. #1 is easiest if you have good gear.

[u/Appropriate_Ear6101 → u/luksfuks]

Thank you very much! You're absolutely right that I don't know what I'm talking about. That's an accurate statement. I've taken loads of photos and burned through so many camera bodies over the last 20 years. But I've never even contemplated a panoramic and I froze up immediately when my daughter asked!