A Panorama
December 25th, 2006 by Benji Mast
Our house has a gorgeous view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I’ve been wanting, for some time to do a panorama of the visible range. I finally did it. I made the amateur mistake of not making each exposure the same. After I completed the stiching, I had to create numerous adjustment layers with black layer masks. Then, with a big, soft, brush, I painted white on a black mask to expose the area I wanted to correct. It still isn’t perfect, but at least I learned something.
One interesting note, since I used six pictures to create the panorama, the final, full-resolution file was 18983 x 1972, or 37.4 mega pixels. It isn’t quite the sum of six, eight mega pixel pictures, because, in spite of my best efforts, the tripod wasn’t level. So I had to crop off the rough edges.
I shot this at 300 mm or 487 mm 35 mm equivalent. I always struggled to capture the beauty that could be observed by scanning the evening horizon, because if I went too wide the contours of the ridges would get lost as a line running through the picture. I could hardly just crop it out because of the resulting low quality of such a slice, and if I zoomed in to get the shape of the mountains, you would lose the picture of the whole. Finally a solution…
I need to fill some space in here to make the picture fit in right. I’m sure there is a better way. I’m also sure I don’t know how.
Hey, good work! Something like this is not an easy project to undertake. Hope living and loving goes well for you as you go to school.
Panoramas are a lot of work so I stray away from them
. Very impressive.
I agree with you there are just some things that cannot be captured accurately without using a panorama. For all the panoramas I make I use a program called autostitch. It is available free at http://www.autostitch.net (all the pans on my site were created with it.)