Time Immortal

I seem to be doing panoramic photos lately. And it helps that there have been a few photo-worthy sunsets of late, I suppose.

This particular picture was composed from a 3-by-3 grid of photos, assembled in Autopano (Curse your precision, program! I will find your weakness yet!) and then cropped and adjusted in Lightroom. I tried to bring out the buildings in the foreground as much as was possible, although this the results definitely fall short of what one could potentially achieve with HDR. I’m just not ready to try HDR in a panoramic photo yet.

Here’s another panoramic, with a bit of a twist this time; the real panoramic view of the city is the slightly distorted, slightly warped reverse-angle visible in the windows; the actual city of Edmonton appears properly only on the far right, and then only just.

Basically, I’m trying to contrive situations which cause Autopano to choke. As yet, I haven’t managed to do this.

I haven’t done a sunset panoramic in a while, and this particular beautiful sunset was a chance to play with Autopano again.

I am also quite pleased with Lightroom’s “Match Total Exposures” feature, which worked exactly as I hoped it would and ensured a nice, even gradient in the sky colour, from light on the left to dark on the right.

I’ve been looking through the archives to see if I can find some older photos that would do for the creation of polar coordinate pictures (photos like these). This one, a panoramic of Edmonton’s river valley from earlier this year, almost fits the bill, and renders reasonably well.

So I was browsing through this category of photos on Flickr, and decided that I wanted to have a go at creating my own “little planet” pictures. This is a first attempt, composed from a 6-shot panoramic I took of a keyboard in the office. It was stitched with Autopano, and then “polarized” in Photoshop. Supposedly, I could have used Hugin to achieve the same effect, but I haven’t figured that part out yet.

This is almost the same shot as yesterday, and in fact the two were made from the same source files. But this panoramic is a bit wider, and was also done in a pseudo-HDR style (I didn’t take three sets of 39 shots, mind; I just used the same set of 39 at +/-1 exposure stop). I had to fiddle with contrast for a good half hour when it was all said and done, but I like the result.

The source file for this panoramic image is huge — on the order of 116 megapixels, if memory serves. The image is composed from 39 shots arranged in a 13×3 grid, and was stitched together with Autopano. There’s a bit more barrel distortion in the picture than I would normally accept, but I can’t fault the overall quality of the stitching — it is superior even to Hugin.

Quite possibly the most awesome wedding reception decoration scheme I have ever had the good fortune to behold. This image is actually a panoramic, stitched together from two source images.