Shot with PENTAX K10D, processed using

I shot four shots of the Tornio River in Jatuni in Finnish Lapland in February of 2008. I finally got around to downloading the open source Hugin panorama tools on my Mac to see what would come out of them.

The first problem was that I had not locked the exposure when shooting the photos. I don’t know how well Hugin would’ve handled differently exposed photos, but I discovered a great feature in Lightroom that solved the problem for me: there’s an option called “Match Total Exposures” in the Settings menu that matched the exposures of the four shots.

I had previously tried to create a panorama when shooting interiors, but it seemed to me that despite trying to keep the exposure the same, there would be these horrible lines where the photographs joined. Partly this was due to misaligned images, partly due to the non-matching exposures. When creating the panorama in Hugin, it seemed to be the case this time as well. I was determined to try and mask away such misalignments in Photoshop Elements and exported the image out of Hugin, and much to my surprise, it looked perfect. Apparently, the Hugin shows the lines where the photographs join in the preview window, but mercifully leaves them out of the final product.

The result you can see above. A panorama of the Tornio River, or Väylä as the locals call it.