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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.

How about another panoramic? As a general rule, almost every panoramic I have composed has wound up being featured as a Pic of the Day, and certainly there was no way I was going to pass up posting this one.

One of the biggest things I struggle against in editing photos is the natural “fade” that accompanies long-distance shots. As the distance between the lens and the scenery in question increases, the colours become more subdued and hazy. This effect isn’t the easiest to correct for (a UV filter helps a bit, but only a bit), and typically requires a fair number of adjustments. In the past, I’ve gotten lucky with iPhoto’s “Enhance” tool, which has generally done well to bring out the details that distance has diminished.

This time, though, I managed to get the look I wanted in Lightroom.

As usual, I began by editing each photo separately, matching exposures and adjusting colours somewhat in order to get a uniform look across all the shots. I then exported the pictures as TIFF files and loaded them into Hugin, my panorama editor, and lined them up manually using a fair number of control points between each shot.

As usual, Hugin rendered the image well (I can detect a couple of flaws, but that’s okay), and I loaded the result back into Lightroom for additional editing. After fiddling with the contrast and shadow intensity for a bit, and bumping the Clarity up quite high, I got the image to the point it’s at above, which I find quite satisfactory.

Have I mentioned that I’m glad that Lightroom no longer prohibits the import and manipulation of images wider than 10,000 pixels?

I apologize that the pictures are getting a little disjointed; usually there is something akin to a narrative flow to the series in the Pics of the Day, but in this case things are jumping around a bit. I’ve been having trouble finding time to edit all the pictures I took in Vancouver, and this is doubly true of panoramic images, which is the reason that things are a bit out of order.

I’m very happy with this picture; I just didn’t get around to finishing it until after I’d posted a picture taken from the ferry that Grace and I caught the following day.

Anyhow, this is Coal Harbour, which is located just off of downtown Vancouver, a bit west of Stanley Park. It’s a pretty nice area, actually, and it’s easy to see why it and other parts of Vancouver get used in a variety of different television shows and movies.

As has become fairly standard for the panoramic images I compose, I took each of the six shots that comprise this image and matched the exposure levels in each, in addition to applying my usual calibration/Punch preset to each. I re-thought the Clarity setting that is a part of the Punch preset though, and set it back to 0 (from 50), because I intended to mess with the Clarity of the finished panoramic.

I also applied noise reduction and chromatic aberration correction to each image, before exporting the lot of them as TIFF files. I then loaded the images into Hugin and defined…quite a lot of control points between each image and its neighbour (on the order of 15 per image pair, which is high for me). Hugin took about ten minutes to render the finished image, which I loaded back into Lightroom for further adjustment. Specifically, I set the Clarity to -100, giving the image that “diffusion print” look again which, in the harbour setting, really worked out well (it gave a slightly misty quality to the boats and the rest of the background).

That image is what the good Reader sees here now.

Here’s another panoramic from the dockyards near downtown Vancouver.

As usual, this shot was composed with Hugin, and as usual Hugin’s performance was pretty good; I can see a couple small disjoints in this image, but for the most part it is a smooth composition, and I’m happy about that.

Per how I usually handle panoramics, I started by matching the exposures on each of the seven shots comprising this image in Lightroom. I also applied a fairly standard set of presets concerning sharpening, colour calibration, chromatic aberration reduction, and noise reduction. I also tweaked the highlights a little bit, and then exported all the pictures as TIFF files.

The final product out of Hugin was a large image over sixteen thousand pixels wide, which Lightroom wouldn’t have supported but which Lightroom 2 handles just fine; I straightened and cropped it somewhat, brightened everything a little bit, and then exported the final product.

Update: Welcome, Steynians! And don’t worry — I harbour no nefarious intent in taking pictures of the dockyards here. And to be sure, nobody around the area walked over to interdict me in my photo-taking spree, and I was there for a good half hour or so.

Which is not to say that I haven’t been interdicted before, of course; while in England, I was taking pictures of the trains there, and was asked to delete the photos from the camera by a concerned security guard. The lesson that I took away from that, however, was that security guards don’t understand digital cameras all that well. After deleting the offending photos, I switched memory cards in my EOS 350D, pocketing the old card and not using it again until I got home. Once I got back to my office, I ran an “undelete” utility on the card and recovered the missing photos.

Learn the technology, people! Learn it well, because I’m not the only guy who knows how to do data recovery on a memory card. And while my intentions are good — I just like taking pictures a) because a particular scene looks pretty/interesting to me, or b) so that I can have visual catalysts for good memories — not everyone who knows how to use data recovery software has similarly good intentions.

Here’s another panoramic, almost identical to this previous attempt…but substantially more massive as well. Unlike the previous panoramic, this one is not merely composed from a single row of shots; sixteen shots arranged eight across and two down comprise this picture — it’s the equivalent of a 61 megapixel image (albeit not in the standard 3×2 image format one might expect).

As usual, I used Hugin to make this picture, and as usual it was almost flawless in its performance (there is only one seam error that I’ve found in this image so far). The editing process was pretty straightforward: exposures between all the images were matched, and the same blend of edits — the calibration/Punch preset, some minor noise reduction, and shadow and highlight adjustments — was applied to each photo. Hugin was then used to stitch them together.

It’s a pretty cool scene, if I do say so myself; the cargo itself is an interesting enough subject, and the cranes on the left provide an eye-catching scenic piece (the astute Reader will also note the ship currently being loaded sitting just beneath the arms of the cranes). Even the sky kind of worked out, despite being full of clouds.

This is the first of a couple panoramics I took at the docks (the second, substantially larger, has yet to be assembled), and it has to be said that the parking lot (which was raised above the main dock area) was a good platform to take such pictures from. There are seven or eight shots in this particular composition.

As usual, I used Hugin to make this picture, and as usual it was almost flawless in its performance (there is only one seam error that I’ve found in this image so far). The editing process was pretty straightforward: exposures between all the images were matched, and the same blend of edits — the calibration/Punch preset, some minor noise reduction, and shadow and highlight adjustments — was applied to each photo. Hugin was then used to stitch them together.

It’s a pretty cool scene, if I do say so myself; the cargo itself is an interesting enough subject, and the cranes on the left provide an eye-catching scenic piece (the astute Reader will also note the ship currently being loaded sitting just beneath the arms of the cranes). Even the sky kind of worked out, despite being full of clouds.

It’s time for another panoramic, I think.

As usual, I composed this with Hugin, and as has become the norm with Hugin, it took very little time to produce once I had all the images prepped. I’m a little bit dissatisfied with the cloud colour toward the right of the frame, and tried to balance exposure and colour tones in Lightroom, but didn’t quite get things there. C’est la vie — I’ve got the originals, so I might go back and revisit the shot later. What’s interesting is that the colours in the orange of the sunset line up with the neighbouring images — I suspect that the aberration in the clouds there might have something to do with the buildings in the distance casting a long shadow as the Sun dipped below the horizon.

That nitpick aside, however, I do like the picture — sunsets on partly cloudy days can, under the right circumstances, look just awesome, and this one was particularly fiery. It didn’t need any tweaking to orange, yellow, or red saturation, although I did a bit anyhow just because I like to eke as much colour out of an image as I can.

Okay, so I didn’t take the opportunity to take just one picture of the fields out at Grace’s grandfather’s farm. This is another picture, done in the same style as the previous one, looking a little more toward toward the West.

As before, the picture you see here is actually a panoramic — or, at least, a stitched shot. I used my 50 mm lens to capture the initial images that comrpise these photos, and then stitched the source photos together using Hugin. While it doesn’t present a very wide view overall, unlike a “true” panoramic might, the picture does present a much higher quality of detail within its frame than the equivanelt shot would if I had used my 17-85 mm lens.

Of course, Hugin almost never turns out a perfectly rectangular image, and in this case that was doubly true because I had to drop two source photos out of the final render because they were out of focus. That meant, in turn, that I had to draw in part of the sky with Photoshop after the fact. It didn’t turn out all that great, but I am getting better at using that program, and in a print there’s really nothing that the eye can see that would suggest I’ve tampered with the picture.

Incidentally, in both cases, the portion of the sky I tampered with was in the upper-right part of the image. Here, I even had to draw in the last few wisps of that one cloud that pokes itself out into the blue. The “Smudge” tool was particularly useful for that.

Of the two, I prefer this shot — the interplay of shadow and light is better.

Back in December of 2007, Grace and I went out to help her dad and sister chop wood on her grandfather’s farmland. This is a yearly tradition for Grace’s family, as they have a wood burning stove in the basement that they often use for supplementary heating during the cold months (it’s also just nice for atmospheric warmth on some evenings!). The farm has large patches of trees on it, and every few months Grace’s dad will head out to collect a few more.

While we were there, I took the opportunity to capture a few photos of the fields covered in snow.

The picture you see here is actually a panoramic — or, at least, a stitched shot. I used my 50 mm lens to capture the initial images that comrpise these photos, and then stitched the source photos together using Hugin. While it doesn’t present a very wide view overall, unlike a “true” panoramic might, the picture does present a much higher quality of detail within its frame than the equivanelt shot would if I had used my 17-85 mm lens.

Of course, Hugin almost never turns out a perfectly rectangular image, and in this case that was doubly true because I had to drop two source photos out of the final render because they were out of focus. That meant, in turn, that I had to draw in part of the sky with Photoshop after the fact. It didn’t turn out all that great, but I am getting better at using that program, and in a print there’s really nothing that the eye can see that would suggest I’ve tampered with the picture.