timeimmortal

Time for another panoramic. I’m not sure, but it seems to me that I took quite a lot of panoramic images in Vancouver — while I don’t think I took as many as I did while in England, I wonder if the overall frequency, relative to the duration of the trip, was higher?

Anyhow, the picture:

This is a small harbour along Westwater Drive near Richmond, British Columbia. It’s on the road that more or less connects the area near Finn Slough with Steveston, a harbour community south of Richmond, and apparently the home to more than a few interesting shops.

Anyhow, Grace’s parents stopped the van so that both Grace’s sister and I could take some pictures of the harbour (it is a good view, even if it is a bit cloudy), and for whatever reason I decided to take yet another panoramic image set.

Edit-wise, I matched exposures between the images (as usual) and did some basic editing to clean up chromatic aberration, digital noise, and other issues. I then exported each image as a TIFF file, and loaded the whole lot of them into Hugin.

Experience with other harbour panoramics has taught me that a lot of control points are necessary for images of this nature, so I went a little bit crazy in defining said points, but I think it worked out for the best. Hugin did its job well, and I have only found one notable misalignment in the image so far. And it’s a big image (nearly 11,000 pixels wide).

Once the panoramic had been rendered, I loaded it back into Lightroom and did a few additional edits, including saturation adjustments and some additional exposure tweaking. I also set the Clarity to -100, which gave the image a slightly diffuse, not-quite-misty feel that I like.

Here’s one more shot from Finn Slough, and old boat that I can only assume has not been seaworthy in quite some time. Then again, I don’t know boats, so perhaps the one in this picture is still capable of holding its own on the water.

But I suspect not.

The more I play with Lightroom 2, the more I get addicted to the diffusion effect that comes with setting the Clarity to a negative value. It just looks good on so many images (not on all, to be fair).

Edit-wise, in addition to the above-mentioned Clarity adjustments, I applied the Vivid preset to bring out many of the colours in this image. However, because of some particularly harsh chromatic aberrations, I had to desaturate the magenta and purple hues quite heavily. Other hues — notably the blues and greens — saw their saturation boosted somewhat.

I also had to do quite a lot of highlight reduction on the sky, but this worked out (more or less), and some cloud detail was recovered from what had otherwise been a washed-out area of the image. A bit of sharpening rounded things out, resulting in the image that you see here, O Reader.

There’s a certain…”not entirely real” quality about the scene.

Once we got back to Vancouver, Grace and I wasted little time in getting caught up in preparations for her grandfather’s 75th birthday celebration, which was scheduled for the coming weekend. Her various family members had been periodically referring to the names of some of the expected guests, and had mentioned more than once that a couple of them were residents of a place called Finn Slough.

Grace’s dad decided to take us driving past the slough one afternoon, and I have to admit it was an…interesting experience. Sobering, I think, would be the best word for it, because the slough is certainly a very stark picture of the reality of poverty, especially when one can drive only a few hundred metres up the road and find decadent rural mansions.

Yes, people do live in there. It’s quite a close-knit community, I’m told; they don’t tend to welcome outsiders, and the “privilege” of living in the slough is only granted to newcomers if one of the current residents moves out or passes away.

Edit-wise, this shot received the Vivid preset that I occasionally (very occasionally) use, which boosted the colours in the shot quite nicely. I needed to do a fair bit of chromatic aberration reduction, and then manually adjusted the master hue setting to diminish the intensity of the greens in the grass. A few shadow adjustments rounded things out, resulting in the image you see here.