I like wide angle shots, but I usually quit at splicing two frames horizontally or three frames vertically. Going to four our more frames spliced horizontally produces a long skinny picture. There are not many subjects well suited to such a long format, and when a good subject is found there are not many ways to effectively display the results. But sometimes, I just can’t resist.

Here are four frames taken near Hancock, New York. Hancock is a picturesque small town in central New York, just north of the border with Pennsylvania. I took the frames with the idea of making an elongated spliced panorama.

The appeal of this scene was the amount of interesting content over the whole wide field of view. For example, here is the rightmost frame, showing the Delaware River, train tracks, and the railroad bridge.

A cylindrical projection often works best for this type of shot. It avoids gross distortions and provides the greatest amount of vertical extent after cropping. Photoshop Elements™ with the cylindrical Photomerge™ produced this result:

I cropped the image to the largest contained rectangle. The camera, a Nikon P6000 pocket camera zoomed out to 28mm equivalent, was hand held and you can see that the images are not perfectly aligned vertically. Had the camera been leveled on a tripod the improved alignment would have provided slightly more vertical height in the final image. The fuss would not have been worthwhile to me.

I used the Enhance > Adjust color > Remove Color Cast … filter to take out some of the blue cast of the image. The original color is shown in the rightmost frame, above. Clicking one of the shadows on a snow bank provided adjustment to neutral gray. It is a matter of taste whether the bluish version is better. The blue version looks colder, but I preferred to play up the brown tones in the vegetation.

The finished image is 12,083 pixels x 2555 pixels, about 31 megapixels. That would make a nice large print, about 40 inches x 8.5 inches at 300 dpi. A version of the image at about 3000 × 640 is here.