I need to take a picture (sample picture attached) at night with my EOS5Dii camera. This picture is for a friend of mine who is planning to having it printed at 140cm by 240cm on canvas. I have never printed this big, and so have no idea if 21MP will be enough for such a picture. I was thinking of zooming in and taking 4 pictures and merge them in one with photoshop to increase the resolution, but I am afraid that the result will not be so good because of the sea in the foreground. Also shall I aim for a long exposure at ISO400 or even lower, or for a short exposure at ISO3200 to get the least noise possible and the best result? Any advise will be highly appreciated.
Etienne.
I have quite a bit of experience with exactly this subject matter. You need about 17,000 pixels on the wide side to get a 240cm wide print at 180dpi. So you would need to stitch. That means four pictures side-by-side, allowing for 20-30% overlap when shooting the to-be-stitched panorama. If you want nose-sharp results, go for 6-10 columns.
People have good experiences with PS stitching. I haven't tried it, and use Autopano Pro.
Use the lens at its sweet spot aperture, usually stopped down two stops or so. Take a lot of test shots, examine the histogram carefully in the darkest frames of the set and the one with the harshest highlights. If you don't think you can contain the dynamic range in one exposure which is often the case with nighttime cityscapes, you might need to bracket - which quickly becomes time-consuming when shooting, and post-processing becomes a whole new project in itself.
Go for the lowest ISO to get least noise. Don't worry about the water reflections. If you use exposures lasting several seconds, it will stitch just fine and where it doesn't, it's quick to fix in PS. And it'll look great!
Good sturdy tripod and mirror lockup is a must.
Below an example of what you can expect from such a project if you go for a 218 megapixel panorama, bracketed 3 sets of shots. The
full-resolution shot is on my site.