where we are

Taken at Dow’s Lake, this is a 5 image vertical pano taken with the Canon new 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS lens. The reason for the pano is simple, at a fixed 100mm I couldn’t get a clear shot of this tree without including lots of other trees and distracting foreground elements. So I got in a bit closer, set my exposure (in Manual) and panned straight up overlapping about half way through each shot (I probably could have gotten away with less overlap).

Stitching photos together used to be inaccurate and often led to more fails than success (though that’s photography for you right?) – but with Photoshop CS3 and, I hear, CS4 stitching is spot-on, nearly perfect if you give the program enough to work with.

It’s also a great way to boost the resolution of your image. Want that fancy new 20MP camera? Me too, but I’ve only got eight – but three shots together (taken closer to the subject) will give me quite a bit more than 20MP right? get even closer to the subject as shoot 5 images and I’m rocking the 40MP medium format resolution. SWEET!

I also heard Adobe Photoshop Elements has not integrated photomerge/panorama/stitching into it’s software package so really you have no excuse to not experiment. Remember; shoot in manual mode and manual focus so things aren’t changing in the scene all the time; just rotate on an axis so you don’t shift the image (a tripod is best), overlap the images so there are elements from the previous frame into the next one. Merge and ENJOY!

There’s also some cool tricks which you can ‘cheat’ your shallow depth of field – but that’s for another time.

Posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 9:21 pm. Filed under: Nature Tags: Dows_Lake, Fall_colours, Ottawa, Tree RSS 2.0 feed.