San Francisco Christmas Lights from Yerba Buena Island by Henry Houghton Via Flickr: Canon 5D II w/85mm f/1.2 85mm ISO 100 30 sec @ f9 7 shot (vertical stitch) - more on this below RAW processed in Lightroom TIff in Photoshop CS5 Please view large or continue to view at like 250 pixels tall ;P "In the shadow of the city, the light glows brightest." I took this shot right before I left for Hawaii and I felt like taking a break from seascapes. I went for 6 shots with the camera in the portrait position. I overlap by about 1/5 of a frame when capturing the panoroma. I do this because when it comes time to stitch, I want as much source image as possible to sample from to take out those infamous trails in the water from the constant ferry, coastguard, and freighter traffic around the island. I do my stitching in Photoshop CS5 on the “reposition” setting. After the rendering is complete, I look for the seams and then I overlay the original source image on top of the panoramic image and mask in where the seams are visible. At least with lines in the water, after you get the knack of it, its quite forgiving. Sometimes the reflections can make it look like there's a seam where there isn't because of the way light hits the miniwaves and currents. The hard stuff is when you have a weird seam on hard structures such as building and bridges. The reason for this is in water or sky, often you can mask away the hard line in the seam at 100% opacity then feather it out by reducing the opacity of your brush. You can’t do that for hard objects, if you do you’ll wind up with transparent building and the like - not too pretty. I’m definitely better at the process than I was a year ago, so its all practice. Don’t forget to zoom in at 100%+ to look for the smallest seams. Panoramas can be ton’s of pixels and even the smallest seam gets big once you’ve printed it 20x60 inches! The side-effects to using 7 shots to create the panorama is that it takes 3 min to make all the exposures and the light will change during that time unless a pure nighttime shot. To accentuate this I started on the right side where I knew it would be brightest (also where most of the ocean traffic comes from so you can stay ahead of them) and moved to the left. I did play with ISO slightly to adjust exposure as I panned left to keep the things close in terms of brightness. But I wanted it to be dark and glowy on the left. If you don’t, or have different lighting situations, pan the other way for more even light - you’ll start in the dark area when it’s brightest and move to the light area when it’s darkest. Changing the ISO only changes the noise level and not water smoothness (shutter speed) nor DoF (aperture) and with the 5D II, anything below 320 looks very very similar unless when viewed at 100+%. Thanking you in advance for your views/comments/favs =)
