I’ve just gotten back to taking and making panoramas after a break of several months. Some good weather lately inspired me to go out and try to capture the light.
The conditions were perfect for landscape photography with high altitude clouds providing texture to the sky, a moderately clear horizon for the setting sun for lovely colours, and not too windy. The waves add texture to the water but do pose a slight challenge to making sure that seams are not too obvious. A small amount of retouching during post-processing was needed to smooth over the most obvious joins.
The main challenge is dealing with the large range of contrast within the whole scene. The dark rocks and seaweed have to be balanced against the sunset and bright sky. Much of this is able to be handled by the dynamic range of the camera, a Sony A7m3 shooting raw, but some additional steps needed to be taken to comfortably cover the extremes in exposure. In addition to the usual shooting pattern of 4 around (spaced at 90 degrees) + Zenith + Nadir, additional shots were made directly at the brightest parts of the sky using autoexposure (as I use for all the shots). This additional shot will have detail in the brightest parts that can be combined with the rest of pano that has detail in the dark and mid tones. Enfuse is used to combine the various exposures into a single image without having to go through the steps of creating an HDR intermediate image and then tonemapping.
I have also delved into the back catalogue of panoramas that were taken but but assembled, in this case ones taken in 2019 and 2020.
These panoramas varied in difficulty. The Christmas Market pano had many extra shots added and masked in to deal with moving objects such as people and the Big Wheel. Exposure blending was also used to tame the contrast. The Pollok House pano did not have to worry to much about moving objects between frames but did have a very large contrast range. This require bracketing and exposure blending to arrive at a decent image. The Kelpies pano was as staightforward as you could get, a simple 4+Z+N shooting pano, no need for bracketing as the dynamic range of the camera was sufficient, and not even exposure blending was required.
I’ll continue to dive into the back catalogue to see of there are any more unassembled panos waiting for their turn. Hopefully there are some undiscovered gems.