[Kombisaurus]

Hey guys,

This is a re-post of an image I posted as part of my Kununurra Landscapes Post a few weeks back.

At the time I'd done all the processing for the series on my new notebook, and I didn't realise how out of whack the colours were until after I'd come back and looked at the shots on another screen. The images tend to have a green cast to the shadows in them.

Anyway, I re-did this particular image from scratch (back to the RAW files) on a desktop PC with a slightly better calibrated screen.

The image is a panorama composite of 12 shots that encompass almost a full 180 degree view. To be standing where I was at sunset and have this view all around me was simply breathtaking. The final image is a touch over 50 megapixels, and has presented me with many challenges and I've spent more than a few hours toiling over this one.

The version I'm posting here has had the RAW files exposed seperately for the sky and land and then recombed as layers in photoshop before running the resulting jpg's through Autostitch to put them all together.
I've found it quite difficult to expose properly, as each of the 12 individual shots that make up the image has to be exposed in exactly the same way to ensure it can all fit together without looking patchy. This means that certain compromises need to be made along the way, and every change I make has to be made 12 times. The sheer amount of detail and angle of view involved makes this quite tricky.

But enough drivel... here's the shot:


I still think there is room for improvement here, and there are a million different crops that seem to work. In particular I find the two groups of dead trees on the riverbank very appealing, and of course the centrepiece hill surrounded by the river.

Here's a 50% crop of a detail around one of the groups of dead trees as an example:


I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts and ideas and how you might tackle an image or scene such as this... and what I might do with this one now.

oh, btw here are the shot details in case anyone wants to know.

Lens: EF-S 18-55 f/3.5-5.6 (Kit Lens) @ 33mm with circular polariser fitted.
The camera was mounted on a tripod and set to full manual with manual focus.
All shots were taken with the same settings and focus. To obtain these settings, I lined up an "average" section of the shot that had a bit of sky, some trees, some cliffs and a bit of shadow in similar proportions to the whole scene, set the aperture to f/16 and ISO to 100 and then adjusted the shutter speed until it was reading a correct exposure (which equated to 1/2 second shutter speed). I then took a few sample shots of various sections of sky and shadow in the scene to ensure that exposure was appropriate for the lightest and darkest sections as well as the mid-tones. I also activated the mirror lockup custom function and used a wireless remote to trigger the shutter just to ensure there was absolutely no camera shake.
The panorama consists of two rows of six shots, each taken in "landscape" format. I had the camera levelled on the tripod and simply panned about 3/4 of a frame after each shot.

Cheers
Adrian

[R3N]

Absolutely stunning! :o

[EnglishBob]

Everybit as impressive second time around

[Irma]

I think this picture has a lot of merits... first to take all those pictures very well.... and then to process them as you said separately preserving uniformity... and then stich them together... Great work in your panorama picture, Kombi... The place is great, indeed; and your picture capture it beautifuly...

Just a question, How you work with such big picture in PS... Does the program work fine with a big file like this one?

[Zig]

Omygawsh Kombi, I missed these...that top one really does it for me mate: movement, good strong edges, tone, texture and draws me in. I'm trying not to be gushy here, but this is really a cut above IMO.
Part of its "sense" for me is its lighting direction(s): this suspends belief in a true panorama and purists might argue for the feeling of one light source being needed. I reckon it adds a lovely otherwordliness.
(You might want to have a look at work by Colin Prior, who did much stuff with a Fuji 617 medium format panoramic camera..masterful lighting)

[Kombisaurus]

Thanks everyone for the comments

Irma, Photoshop seems to work fine with large images like this, but I wouldn't like to go much bigger without more RAM.
The photoshop file size for this image is about 270mb (8-bit RGB with a few layers and masks), and the PC's I use photoshop on all have 1gb of RAM. Of course all the filters and adjustments take a bit longer to apply because they have to be applied to many more pixels, but generally photoshop seems really quite efficient and I don't get "disk thrashing" (like I would using similar large images in Corel).
Having said that, I get the feeling this is about the upper size limit for images to remain quite usable without adding more RAM to my PC.
I usually prefer to work in 16-bit RGB in Photoshop CS2 now, but I wasn't game to try it with this image because it essentially doubles the image size.

Zig, thanks for your insights. The "dual lighting" effect is because I used a polariser when taking these shots, but the polarising effect changes across the frame with such a wide angle. The end result is a lot of polarising in the middle of the image (where the lens was 90deg to the sun) but basically none at either end. FWIW the sun was just out of the picture on the left of frame.
I did take another version of these shots without a polariser (knowing the polariser would give an uneven effect to the sky), but I much prefer the polarised version. The un-polarised version simply has a blown-out sky across the whole image and looks flat and boring (as does the river reflections).
After being annoyed at the "dual lighting" effect for about 5 minutes I simply got used to it and like you, I think it gives the image a unique feel and adds to the expanse of the sky.

I had a bit of a look at Colin Prior's work, and it is certainly very impressive. *sigh* So many good landscape photographers...

Cheers
Adrian