Pano

[armand]

After playing quite a lot trying to overcome my poor setup/technique I came up with something that looks decent (I hope)

PS. you don't want to know where I was standing for this one

[Tony Jay]

Great image.

Lovely subtle tones.

PS am I supposed to get vertigo.

Regards

Tony Jay

[degrub]

Reminds me of Obi point or the dragons from the north rim. You had a really good day without the usual heavy haze.

Frank

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

Excellent image, is it a stitch or a crop?

Great colour and detail and a very difficult scene to capture, however there is one little niggle for me and that is the darker area in the sky top right (polariser effect?). I am sure you could lighten that a tad and blend it in if you agree.

From experience, I have found that polarisers and pano's are not the best of friends, so for me and for no other reason than to avoid the uneven sky effect, I no longer use a polariser if I am stitching a pano.

Dave

[armand]

Excellent image, is it a stitch or a crop?

Great colour and detail and a very difficult scene to capture, however there is one little niggle for me and that is the darker area in the sky top right (polariser effect?). I am sure you could lighten that a tad and blend it in if you agree.

From experience, I have found that polarisers and pano's are not the best of friends, so for me and for no other reason than to avoid the uneven sky effect, I no longer use a polariser if I am stitching a pano.

Dave

Yep, that's the polarizer. I keep doing the same thing over and over again. The other significant mistake is that although I put everything on manual I forgot the change the ISO from auto so all of them are shot at ISO 800. On D90 is not that bad but is not optimal either, probably the largest that I can print without major issues is around 44" length (which is the maximum of my printer anyway).

It's a stitch from 8 to 11 portrait images, forgot how many. This cropped version I think it is somewhere around 400 MB. Initially I couldn't get it as my leveling was even worse than I thought, upgoing from both sides to the middle so I was getting only very circular images.
Eventually I initially processed them in DxO where I took care of the geometry and noise and also leveled them, from there it went into Photoshop which did a very good job on it's own.
As I am terrible with Photoshop because my time is limited I just saved the image and did all the other adjustments (curves, clarity, etc) in Lightroom.

You had a really good day without the usual heavy haze.

It was better than others but not great, however some basic adjustment with clarity, curves and black levels took care of it.

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

I forgot the change the ISO from auto so all of them are shot at ISO 800.

You know Armand, this may sound a bit dumb on my part, but about 4 or 5 years ago, I got so p*ssed off with myself for repeatedly getting carried away with the moment and then realising afterwards that I hadn't changed the settings from the previous shoot and blowing the shot, that I actually printed a small label [SETTINGS!!!] and stuck just above the on/off switch. I realised because I was getting so caught up in the moment that I could not trust myself to pause long enough to work things out correctly, it was a failing I was struggling to overcome, so I admitted defeat and came up with this failsafe solution which really worked for me - thankfully I am well over this now and in fact over the last few years, I have gone the other way and whatever is happening, however fleeting, I will not be rushed. Slow but sure usually turns out to be quicker than rushing around and blowing the shot. Because there is nothing worse than trying to save a killer image in PS, that you know if you had just took a little more time about and applied a considered approach to it, would be so much better.

Dave

[armand]

That might be a good idea. There were 2 factors involved in my rush. First was that I arrived late and I stayed in the beginning in other spots so when I got there the light was going quite fast. The second was my physical position; while I don't really have a fear for heights I usually don't feel comfortable with them either and I was quite careful no too add the the statistics of "overzealous" photographers fallen in the line of duty.
Getting there was not that tricky, with the exception of one spot in the not so abrupt but unstable trail where if you sled there was nothing to stop you. Then there was this flat suspended rock, about 6-7m in diameter which was separated by the rest of the wall by a 1.5 feet very deep crevasse. Then there was no solid point if you fell for at least 40-50 m, and doubt that you would have stopped before a couple hundreds meters (not that it would made any difference).
It adds to my personal value of the shot  .
Here is a shot of another brave soul who joined me.

[armand]

And here it is another pano shot in the previous day from a more ordinary place. Unfortunately I wasn't able to preserve the highlights too well.


PS. I checked and the first pano was made from 11 portrait images, the psd is above 500MB but the printed tiff is around 300MB, which turns out for a very good quality print of about 12" by 36" at 350dpi.

[armand]

And here is a shot while I was working on the first pano, taken by the person who was with me there. I thought it's funny.

[William Walker]

Hi Armand

I have never been to this location so I have no idea of the practical difficulties of this shot. Also, the only reference I have of this area is mainly through the pictures taken by Alain Briot.

I am not trying to compare your work with Alain Briot - however, most photographs of his that come to mind show two things that I do not see here:
a) a little bit of foreground to give one some sort of reference and perspective, and b) the river down below. It is really the river that I'm missing in this picture. ( I understand that it might have been an area where there is no river down below!)

I hope that makes some kind of sense.

Regards
WIlliam

[armand]

Hi William,
the river present in the shot might as well be seen as a cliche by some, although the reason here it's that there wasn't much river to see. I would have gladly included more. Btw, there is a portion of the river on the upper side, difficult to see on this small image.

The absence of the foreground is based more on technical than artistic reasons. I keep reading about parallax errors and my camera was definitely not setup to avoid it. Maybe the stitching program could have done a good job anyway but I didn't want to take an unnecessary risk, which brings me to the artistic reasons. While some foreground is usually nice, there are anchor points on both sides of the pano which are at the same level, so you can figure out the scale at some extent. Without those a lack of foreground would have been more obvious.

Armand

[armand]

As you made me to actually look through Alain photos again I found one than is not that far on how it creates your perspective: http://www.beautiful-landscape.com/Print-of-the-month-17.html