Week 9Panoramas are a great way to show wide horizontal scenes in my opinion and they sometimes work good on a vertical. Photoshop or similar software can be used to stitch together a series of pictures and I've used that technique successfully a number of times.
The advantage of that approach is you get great resolution and you don't need an ultra wide lens. The disadvantage is that if things are moving fast it might show, especially in the stitching. I always photograph in Manual with fixed iso, fixed speed, fixed focus, and fixed aperture so that the blending is smoother when I use this technique. It also helps to put your camera on a tripod but I've done OK handheld.
My D3 can make reasonable 20 to 30 inch wide frames though if you don't stand too close without stitching and that is what I've done here. The scene is an old grain silo in the Badlands east of Calgary near the town of Drumheller. I'll post some more pictures of the area in my other blog, Apparently Random Travel Blog. Anyway, when I took the shot I thought it might make a good panorama.
The lighting is coming from the late afternoon sun on the left. The cliffs in the background were dark from shadow so I lightened them up a bit in Photoshop. I bumped up contrast on the grain silo to show the texture and writing on the side better. I also put a slight vignette around the edges to draw the eye to the center.
The camera is a Nikon D3 at ISO 200 and 1/400 sec, lens is a Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 (my new present to myself) at f10 and 24mm.
Idea based on Stretch Your Imagination, pages 128-131 in the book 50 Photo Projects, by Lee Frost
I came back and edited this post to cite the page and title where the concept is described in the book. I left it out last week because I temporarily "lost" the book due to the house move. I think I've found most of my stuff again....
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