lauriemorningglory said:What exactly is photomerging?
Photomerging is the software process of creating a wider angle image from two or more frames from your camera that were taken with the camera at a fixed position, but rotated slightly between frames. It can result in long strip-like images that most would call panoramas. Or the subject can be something closer that you just want a wider or taller view of than you can get from a single frame.
Modern software is good enough (forgiving enough) that you don't even need to have the camera mounted on a tripod to take the single shots. You need to keep the same focal length for all the shots you want to merge, but you can let the camera make its own choices about aperture or exposure time, i.e. you don't have to shoot in full manual mode. You do have to have enough overlap of subject matter between shots for the software to figure things out, maybe 1/4 of each shot overlapping the next one in the sequence.
I use Photoshop or Lightroom for my merges, but I'm sure other editing packages have that capability, too. For the photomerge I used for the banner, I started with several camera shots that were taken in the portrait or vertical format. That allowed me to get most of the pond in the final view without losing the amazing sky.
Lovely beautiful! 
