This week I'm in Sweden teaching an American Photo Mentor photo workshop (www.mentorseries.com). The country's beautiful, the people nice, food is good and the group we've got is a lot of fun to be with. Our first day out, though, we came across a photo we couldn't make. At least at first.

One of our first stops was the Vasa Museum. In 1625 the Swedes were at war with Poland, and the king ordered a new warship built. When launched in 1628, it sailed 1300 meters and promptly rolled over and sank. Somebody was in big trouble.

At that time there was little science involved in designing ships. Built to be the largest warship in the world, it had two gundecks. Until then only light artillery was used on the upper gundecks of ships, but this one would have heavy artillery on both decks. How much ballast a ship needed was a game of guesswork, and in this case, the guess was wrong. It's an interesting story, and you can read all about it at http://www.vasamuseet.se/.

Over three-hundred years later, in 1955, an effort was begun to raise the Vasa. It took five years, but in 1961 it was finally brought to the surface, incredibly intact. A museum was built for it, and that's what we went to see.

If you've seen the small size of ships like those used to carry the Pilgrims to North America, you'll be amazed at the Vasa. There are several balconies you can climb to view it and take photos. We did that, but even using a 12mm lens, we were unable to get the entire ship and museum in one photo (the first photo with this story). This was a perfect opportunity for a panorama.

Panoramas have become incredibly easy to do with digital cameras. You simply shoot several overlapping frames and then "stitch" them together with software. There are a few rules to doing this successfully, though. First, you need to lock your exposure and your white balance. If not, the change in tone and color can make it impossible to merge the images into one that looks natural. I always set my camera for manual exposure and use the flashing highlights and histogram to determine the proper shutter speed and aperture.

For white balance, I set the camera for Incandescent to match the type of lighting used in the museum. Lastly, I shot with the camera mounted to a tripod, as each exposure was one-second at f/4.5. Making sure to overlap each frame at least 1/3, I shot six vertical frames with the 12mm lens. Now for the fun part.

There are lots of software packages that will merge photos together into a panorama. Several years ago I received Arcsoft Panorama Maker (www.arcsoft .com) bundled with a camera I bought. It's incredibly easy to use and makes merging photos a snap. I find it does a better job faster than packages costing much more (it retails for about $40). I opened the program, added the six images in the order needed and told it to go to work. In about a minute it stitched them together. Saved out as a TIFF, I opened it in editing software, cropped it, made some slight tonal and color adjustments and was done.

Much as I like playing with photos on the computer, I'd much rather be out shooting pictures. And with twenty hours of daylight in Sweden during the summer and a packed itinerary, the last thing I want to do is sit at the computer. Speaking of which, it's time to head out for another day of photography. Today we leave Stockholm, taking a ferry to Gotland and the city of Visby. I'll post more images from the trip later.