Rob70
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The beauty of doing Panos is that you can choose the perfect composition later as long as you see that the scene you wish to photograph has the necessary content, like lines, layers, excellent light, special, unusual light, etc. .
I try to lay out my photos over the scene, including some wiggle room, in order to find the perfect crop later that supports the scene as well as possible.
Sometimes such a "Raw composite" even allows for several different images or compositions.
I don't find it practical to try to envision XPan beforehand. Oftentimes your standpoint doesn't allow for the optimal use of that format. I always decide later and even try different formats for the same scene until I find the one that fits best. I've made several presets in the print module of Lightroom for that (ranging from 2:1, 2.3:1, 2.5:1, 2.7:1 = XPAN (approx), 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 2XPAN, 6:1, 8:1), . This way I can see right away the impact of the image in its chosen format.
In your scene the magic happens in the middle with the warm light on the mountains and the tree in the middleground. Those should be more important in my opinion, so I would have cropped tighter, it might still work to keep the XPan format (loosing some of the sky as well), but maybe 2:1 will look better, yet still wide.
Your image seems fine to me as far as exposure goes. It think it would look better if you worked on it a little more. The dark gradient in the sky is pretty extreme and leaves the lower part of it comparably bright, but I gather it's from using a filter. You could still try to remedy that. I try to cope without filters and rely on the dynamic range of my camera and PP.
In general: In my opinion a burnt out sky is worse than some trees that are too dark, so I always expose rather dark. The best way to do this is certainly with the help the histogram of your live view, but a quick and practical way can also be to rely on your display: I often use manual mode, set the aperture like I need it (depending on how close the foreground is and what lens I use, from f/5.6 to f/16), then coming from overexposure, dial up the speed until I see some tones in the brightest parts of the sky (which in my experience is the point, where you can get all of the information back for a nice sky).
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What is your workflow? Stay all well!!!
Bergün from Stugl, Switzerland. A7RII, Summicron 50 IV, Grad filters, Tripod. Format slightly wider than XPAN, 4 photographs stitched with Hugin.
Edited on Apr 12, 2026 at 12:55 PM · View previous versions
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