I was at the San Siro in Milan today. Not to watch AC Milan or Inter Milan (or Italy failing to make it to the World Cup), but just taking some pictures outside, taking advantage of a clear blue sky.

The San Siro is Europe’s 9th biggest stadium with a capacity of about 80,000 spectators. Not a massive stadium but quite big. I was having some trouble getting the whole stadium in a frame at 24mm from a good angle and it occurred to me to stitch a panorama.

It’s been a while since I’ve put one together and I thought it would be fun and potentially highly lucrative.

Taking multiple shots

In total, I captured 9 shots standing at the same spot to capture as much of the stadium as I could, as well as enough space at the top should the buyer wish to insert copy space.

Here they are:

Stitching them together on Lightroom

Select the images you want to stitch together and right-click -> Photo Merge -> Panorama

Panorama Merge Preview

After loading, Lightroom will give you a preview of the pano – this may take a little while as the RAW files can be quite heavy.

This fish-eye look will be temporary, even if it looks kinda cool. Perhaps I’ll submit a fish-eye version as well.

I prefer to not crop here as I’ll explain later. Then click on merge at the bottom (ooops I cut it out on the screenshot above, but you’ll see it). Then wait for a few minutes, depending on your PC/Mac’s specifications, as Lightroom creates it for you.

Straightening Angles

Lightroom makes it easy to straighten bent angles with one click. I didn’t use this option when shooting the Leaning Tower of Pisa though.

Within the Develop Tab -> Lens Correction -> Auto

Then, it’s a good idea to click the “Enable Profile Corrections” tab to get rid of any remaining distortions.

I made a few small mistakes when shooting (but can be corrected)

Even though I took 9 exposures, after strengthening everything, there’s small gaps on the corners of the image which I’ll need to fix on Photoshop (that’s why I didn’t choose to auto-crop earlier).

Also, I also didn’t put in enough sky, but this can be added later on Photoshop.

Onto Photoshop to fix these gaps

I spent a good 40 minutes trying to fix all these issues which were tricky, including lots of cloning and re-cloning, but in the end I think I made it OK. Even if this is an editorial image I believe I’m not altering the scene enough to take away any of the truth – it’s a fine line though.

After Photoshop, I sent it back into Lightroom to add some final touches, such as an ND filter on the sky and the usual changes in contrast, clarity, lighting and white balance.

Final Results

Last but not least, captioning & keywording

I embedded the following caption and keywords onto the image:

Milan, Italy – Nov 30, 2017: San Siro in Milan, Italy is a football / soccer stadium (capacity 80,018) which is home to both A.C Milan and Inter Milan

ac milan, architecture, blue sky, building, calcio, champions, champions league, columns, concert, concrete, design, entertainment, entrance, EUFA, europe, event, fan, fc, FIFA, football, football season, game, gate, giuseppe, giuseppe meazza, historic, huge, inter, inter milan, international football, italian architecture, italian football, italian soccer, italy, italy 1990, landmark, Lombardy, match, match day, milan, milan landmark, modern, modern exterior, nobody, panorama, san siro, sansiro, season, serie a, soccer, spiral, sport, stadio, stadium, stylish, sunny, ticket hall, world cup

So which are the biggest football stadiums in Europe

I mentioned earlier that San Siro is 9th so here’s the top 10!

1. Camp Nou, Barcelona, Spain – 99,354 spectators

2. Wembley Stadium, London, England – 90,000 spectators.

3. Croke Park, Dublin, Ireland – 82,300 spectators

4. Twickenham Stadium, London – 82,000 spectators.

5. Stade de France, Paris, France – 81,338 spectators

6. Santiago Bernabéu, Madrid, Spain – 81,044 spectators.

7. Luzhniki Stadium, Moscow, Russia – 81,000 spectators.

8. Westfalenstadion (Signal Iduna Park), Dortmund, Germany – 80,667 spectators.

9. San Siro (Giuseppe Meazza Stadium), Milan – 80,018 spectators.

10. Atatürk Olympic Stadium, Istanbul, Turkey – 76,092 spectators.

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Will be back in a few weeks to let you know how these do – who knows, they may make as much as Steve Heap’s panorama a few months ago netting him $126.77, his largest sale to date on Shutterstock – link to image and blog post on here.

Hope you found that useful and until next time!

Alex