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Falling H20 at 0 deg F + PANO = (BIG PIC)

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CityLights

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Falling H20 at 0 deg F + PANO = One big image and a COLD photographer!

These were taken at about 8am and it was 0 degrees fahrenheit. The mist from the falls was freezing where it landed.

Full gallery here, I am still working on the images ~ I think they are too blue:

http://www.pbase.com/citylights/burney_falls

Below is a 16 image pano assembled in autostitch. Subtracting for crop and overlap, the resulting pano is 51 mega-pixel.

Any comments are appreciated. I just got it assembled and intend to work on it some more. Then I am going to print it big. ;)

Burney Falls California:



--
CityLights
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/favorites
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/show_case
.
 
CityLights said:
Below is a 16 image pano assembled in autostitch. Subtracting for
crop and overlap, the resulting pano is 51 mega-pixel.
Any comments are appreciated. I just got it assembled and intend
to work on it some more. Then I am going to print it big. ;)
Click to expand...
Wow! What a fall of water. Looks like a lot of it is coming out of the rock, looks like the makings for a beautiful pano! Our falls are freezing in the Columbia River Gorge as well, though I haven't been able to make it out this year :( Looks like you had some troublesome conditions with the bright sunlight in the upper right. Not to mention taking 16 shots without the mist freezing on you lens! Could you estimate how far it is from the left to the right of the farthest main fall, it looks massive!! For this pano, did you expose differently for the upper right to combine with the exposure for the falls? Looks like a wonderful place!
Having seen your previous pano's I'm anxious to see the final product!
--
S4B
http://www.pbase.com/s4b
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~michaelandsylvia/weather/currentWD.htm
 
Wow! 16 image seamless pano, me thinks you've done this plenty of times before ;) It's a beautiful pic and I'm sure it would look stunning printed big!!! (How big do you think you'll print it?)

--
-Matt

Fujifilm S7000
Canon EOS 350D
Opteka Battery Grip
Seagull Angle Finder
Canon Speedlite 430EX / Stofen Omni Bounce Diffuser
EF-S 18-55 Kit lens
EF 75-300 f/4-5.6 III
EF 50 f/1.8 II
Sigma 105mm F/2.8 DG EX

http://matthew-herdel.fotopic.net/
 
Looks like you could have got this with just a few pictures, but you actually had the patience to take a large number of shots to create the panorama... incredible.

But you are right, it looks too blue. It is going to make for an incredibly beautiful large print once you can fix the blue.

--

Slowly learning to use the DRebel (only around 26.000 shots) and now also the Fuji F11.
Public pictures at http://debra.zenfolio.com/ .
 
I think your shot has great atmosphere. composition is good, although I have a feeling I'd like to see more sky even though there are no clouds. The trees at the top need more space to my eye.

It is sometimes difficult to nail white balance. In this case there are 2 zones with different white balance, one sunlight, and one in shade under a clear sky. I'd suggest to use a wb with curves/levels and mask out one zone. The top looks good, bottom too blue. I'd leave a little blue in there to keep the look of cold and it really makes it pop more that way. The bottom looks a little dark to me too. I've used some contrast masking, getting a little more detail there, even seeing the color of the water/river.

It's a good canididate for hdr too, but a 50MP hdr pano would take a long time to process. But actions can help here of course, recording your steps editing a small version and replaying it on the large one. Would not work well with brush strokes I think.

How large are you going to print this one? A full wall? Would be cool, wallpaper size :)

Regards
Imqqmi
CityLights said:
Falling H20 at 0 deg F + PANO = One big image and a COLD photographer!

These were taken at about 8am and it was 0 degrees fahrenheit. The
mist from the falls was freezing where it landed.

Full gallery here, I am still working on the images ~ I think they
are too blue:

http://www.pbase.com/citylights/burney_falls

Below is a 16 image pano assembled in autostitch. Subtracting for
crop and overlap, the resulting pano is 51 mega-pixel.

Any comments are appreciated. I just got it assembled and intend
to work on it some more. Then I am going to print it big. ;)

Burney Falls California:



--
CityLights
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/favorites
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/show_case
.
Click to expand...
 
S4B said:
Wow! What a fall of water. Looks like a lot of it is coming out of
the rock, looks like the makings for a beautiful pano! Our falls
are freezing in the Columbia River Gorge as well, though I haven't
been able to make it out this year :(
Click to expand...
Time to go!
S4B said:
Looks like you had some
troublesome conditions with the bright sunlight in the upper right.
Not to mention taking 16 shots without the mist freezing on you
lens! Could you estimate how far it is from the left to the right
of the farthest main fall, it looks massive!!
Click to expand...
I am terrible at estimating distances, but I pulled this from the website:

Flow: 100 million gallons daily.
Water temperature: is about 42 degrees Fahrenheit.
Height: 129-foot-high waterfall

http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=455
S4B said:
For this pano, did
you expose differently for the upper right to combine with the
exposure for the falls?
Click to expand...
The exposure was the same for all shots in the pano. I exposed to not blow out the highlights in the brightest shot and sacrificed the dark areas. I was worried about the dark areas, but they are not too dark.

For the other single pictures I took, shot RAW, bracketed some, and combined exposures to preserve both shadow and highlight.

Thanks for looking and commenting

--
CityLights
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/favorites
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/show_case
.
 
Matt_3D said:
Wow! 16 image seamless pano, me thinks you've done this plenty of
times before ;) It's a beautiful pic and I'm sure it would look
stunning printed big!!! (How big do you think you'll print it?)
Click to expand...
Thanks. I am not sure yet, but I had this one printed 5-foot x 4-foot.

http://www.pbase.com/citylights/image/67394524

So other than physical limitations for printing, mounting, and a place to put it, the sky is the limit... If I get it printed big, I will post back to dpreview with the results.

--
CityLights
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/favorites
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/show_case
.
 
If I can only get some shots 1/800th as good as many I've seen of yours!!

How do you do panorama?
 
Another wonderful pano image, I have been an admirer of your (inspirational) work since I started viewing these forums. I have read up on panoramas and have to ask if you bother finding the nodal point for your lens/focal length? To my recollection you have not mentioned this. Sorry for the late response, but it is 7.40 p.m. (g.m.t.) here.

Regards, Rod.
 
kbabe said:
If I can only get some shots 1/800th as good as many I've seen of
yours!!
Click to expand...
It takes practice. Some good scenery to shoot helps too!
kbabe said:
How do you do panorama?
Click to expand...
Panorama's work best at about 28mm to 50mm. Anything wider than 28mm and the lens distortion and parralax errors make it hard to stitch. Anything longer than 50mm and it just takes too many pictures to cover the scene.

I shoot RAW and Manual camera mode.

RAW because you can fine tune exposure and white ballance after the fact. If you really want, you can shoot JPG and get good results, but set a specific white ballance to make sure it does not change between shots.

Manual because you want each image to have the same exposure for seamless stitching. In manual mode, point the camera at the brightest part of the scene and set your ISO, shutter, and aperture for a good exposure and handheld shutter speed. Make sure the highlights are not blown in this brightest shot.

Then systematically shoot all the pictures covering your scene. Give yourself about 10-15% overlap between shots. Lots of people like to shoot a single row, but that results in a very short and wide pano. At least turn the camera to portrait orientation and shoot that way for more depth. Even better, shoot two rows for the added depth. For this one, I shot 4 rows of 4 images, but that was way overkill.

When you develop the RAW images, open the brightest scene first. Make all the adjustments in the RAW editor you want to get it looking just like you like. Then open all the other RAW images in the pano and set them "same as previous" so they have the same settings as the first. This will make stitching much easier.

Photoshop has a pano assembler, but I like autostitch much better. The best part is it is free.

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

One more thing, try to make sure your focus distance stays the same for all the pictures. I like to make sure I am focussing far enough that the focus is just infinity because that makes it easy, but you can also pre-focus on the most important thing in the pano and then click the lens into manual focus for the rest of the shooting.

--
CityLights
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/favorites
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/show_case
.
 
Rod K said:
Another wonderful pano image, I have been an admirer of your
(inspirational) work since I started viewing these forums. I have
read up on panoramas and have to ask if you bother finding the
nodal point for your lens/focal length? To my recollection you have
not mentioned this. Sorry for the late response, but it is 7.40
p.m. (g.m.t.) here.
Click to expand...
I have not found the need to find the exact nodal point. It is somewhere between the camera and mid point of the lens. That is close enough. I shoot pano's handheld, lean back slightly, and try to pivot about the approximate nodal point. This method works well for me.

If I ever invest in a special pano head for the tripod, I might worry more about finding the exact nodal point. I must admit, that is way down on the list right now.

Cheers!

--
CityLights
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/favorites
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/show_case
.
 
Very nice. What program do you use to stitch photos?
--
Trying to grow...
Canon 20D with 18-55/3.5-5.6 II, 50/1.8 II, Sigma 70-300/4-5.6 APO DG MACRO
 
hey citylights, ive been working on a project like yours for a while now, and only getting "ok" results.

how much over lap is there between images? do you think you could post another image showing the over lap? what i noticed when overlapping was the light falloff is really annoying... did you crank up the aperture to compensate for that? i also noticed that if you corrected the difference in pictures with brightness/contrast and got the top done alright, the bottom was off... its truly annoying!
anyways, thanks for doing this project again! im trying to pull it off myself!
n8

--
XT, 70-200/f4, 50/f1.8, 10-22/f3.5-4.5
 
natethegreat said:
hey citylights, ive been working on a project like yours for a
while now, and only getting "ok" results.
Click to expand...
Try autostitch, it really works wonders for blending.
natethegreat said:
how much over lap is there between images? do you think you could
post another image showing the over lap?
Click to expand...
Most recommend 10-20% overlap. Looking at this image, I see 30-40% overlap. A couple of the pictures are even duplicate. I stitched the set again, but added a white border to every picture and set the blending off in autostitch. Here's the results:



From this you can see autostitch also applies a lot of distortion and perspective correction! Wow, I didn't realize it was that much.
natethegreat said:
what i noticed when
overlapping was the light falloff is really annoying... did you
crank up the aperture to compensate for that?
Click to expand...
I did not notice any light fall off. I used f/8 just for depth of field and keeping a decent hand holding shutter speed.
natethegreat said:
i also noticed that
if you corrected the difference in pictures with
brightness/contrast and got the top done alright, the bottom was
off... its truly annoying!
Click to expand...
I shoot RAW and adjust the brightest picture first to make sure there are no blown highlights. Then I adjust all other pictures in the raw editor to "same as previous" to make sure they are the same.

Then I stitch the pano. After the pano is stitched, I do my normal workflow to the entire picture. Sometimes, such as in this case, I develop the RAW set one for dark, one for light. I stitch the dark set, stitch the light set. Then I combine the 2 pano images using layers to maximize the dynamic range.
natethegreat said:
anyways, thanks for doing this project again! im trying to pull it
off myself!
n8
Click to expand...
Keep at it. The results are well worth the effort.

--
CityLights
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/favorites
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/show_case
.
 
thats amazing! thanks for doing that, that was a huge project just showing the overlap. im still trying to find that 'perfect' image to try and stitch and make a large image. i will download that autostitch as doing it within photoshop is tough! thanks again citylights,
n8
--
XT, 70-200/f4, 50/f1.8, 10-22/f3.5-4.5
 
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