Rob70
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 Re: The Panorama Image Thread | |
hanay78 wrote:
Congratulations to all in this thread for the fantastic quality of the photographs.
I am very interested by the expressive power of panoramic format.
However, a) I am quite mediocre with panos. It is difficult for me to imagine the composed image when I shoot the different images. I just feel that it could be interesting, and then try to take a series of photographs, but thfiltserse final results may vary.
The beauty of doing Panos is that can choose the perfect composition later as long as you see that the scene you wish to photograph has the necessary content, like lines, layers, excellent light, special, unusual light, etc. .
I try to lay out my photos over the scene, including some wiggle room, in order to find the perfect crop later that supports the scene as well as possible.
Sometimes such a "Raw composite" even allows for several different images or compositions.
I don't find it practical to try to envision XPan beforehand. Oftentimes your standpoint doesn't allow for the optimal use of that format. I always decide later and even try different formats for the same scene until I find the one that fits best. I've made several presets in the print module of Lightroom for that (ranging from 2:1, 2.3:1, 2.5:1, 2.7:1 = XPAN (approx), 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 2XPAN, 6:1, 8:1), . This way I can see right away the impact of the image in its chosen format.
In your scene the magic happens in the middle with the warm light on the mountains and the tree in the middleground. Those should be more important in my opinion, so I would have cropped tighter, it might still work to keep the XPan format (loosing some of the sky as well), but maybe 2:1 will look better, yet still wide.
b) In conditions like the example below, in which a high dynamics range is necessary, it is often hard for me to find a compromise solution that allow to recover shadows and highlights in the whole set of photographs. In this case overexposed for the horizont behind the tree, as I was afraid of getting to dark shadows in the valley.
Your image seems fine to me as far as exposure goes. It think it would look better if you worked on it a little more. The dark gradient in the sky is pretty extreme and leaves the lower part of it comparably bright, but I gather it's from using a filter. You could still try to remedy that. I try to cope without filters and rely on the dynamic range of my camera and PP.
In general: In my opinion a burnt out sky is worse than some trees that are too dark, so I always expose rather dark. The best way to do this is certainly with the help the histogram of your live view, but a quick and practical way can also be to rely on your display: I often use manual mode, set the aperture like I need it (depending on how close the foreground is and what lens I use, from f/5.6 to f/16), then coming from overexposure, dial up the speed until I see some tones in the brightest parts of the sky (which in my experience is the point, where you can get all of the information back for a nice sky).
What is your workflow? Stay all well!!!
Bergün from Stugl, Switzerland. A7RII, Summicron 50 IV, Grad filters, Tripod. Format slightly wider than XPAN, 4 photographs stitched with Hugin.
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