Panoramas, HDR and Photoshop

Well, I think I am happy with my trickier Moab shots now.  They took a bit of work because it was something I haven't done before in Photoshop - merging photos together to make a panorama.  I have done some HDR by hand, but never tried the automatic feature before either.  I learned a lot about the program, but also about what sort of shots work and don't work.  And since I always appreciate it when other people explain what they did, I think I might talk about them a bit.  If you don't care about photography, you can just skip it.

For example, this shot was a piece of cake.  It is actually three shots stitched together, but Photoshop did it automatically.  Everything exposed well, so all I had to do to take the shot was use a tripod and keep it level as I took overlapping shots.

But let me explain HDR for the non-photographer a bit here.  When out eyes see things, we can adapt to many levels of light.  But the camera can't.  For example, when I took this picture so that the rock came out clear, the sky was gone.  My eye could see the clouds and sunshine, but the camera can't.

So then I took a shot that made the sky crystal clear.  But the rock is now gone.

Photoshop merges those into an HDR shot, to make it more like what you normally see.  Now, what I learned this day is that the further the difference between sky and rock, the less . . . real the picture looks.  So while this shot worked, it isn't my favorite.

This picture, on the other hand, I LOVE.  I did my best mountain goat impression and set up my tripod up in the crevice inside an arch, aiming back out.  If you zoomed in enough, you could see that my footprints are the only ones there, coming out from our white truck in the parking lot.

 If I owned a wide angle lens, I could have done this in one shot.  But since those cost $900, I took four shots that overlapped.  I took one set exposed for the rock, one set exposed for the sky, and merged it all into this.  Since the sky wasn't actually that bad in the rock pictures, the merge looks much better.

And then we have this panorama.  This is actually only three pictures across, but took 7 shots to make it all merge together.  I wish you could see the whole shot in more detail, but this is as big as Blogger wants it to go.

I love digital photography!  I love that I can take as many shots as I want and then use Photoshop to make it all come together when I am done.