For my monthly garden photography, as well as the usual views, I am trying a few panoramas:
I have started doing these panoramas for 3 reasons:
- To practice garden panoramas to get my techniques spot-on
- To develop the processing (work flow) into a methodology that I am comfortable with
- To provide a set of images so that I can utilise for interactive (VR – virtual reality) tours
For the first part, I am trying different views to see what works and what doesn’t. This image was taken from a corner of the garden looking roughly north. The sun was to the left but not close enough to intrude on the view. This covers an angle of about 100-120 degrees.
For the second part, I am developing my techniques for processing the photos on the computer – this is often known as ‘workflow’; now I have upgraded the operating system on my computer to 64 bit I can now do things that the panorama stitching software couldn’t do before as it kept running out of memory. Although this gets technical, the steps used here are:
- Three views were taken with 3 ‘bracketed’ images (2 stops apart) in each view
The Jpeg version of these 3 sets of 3 images were processed in the Photomatix HDR software and saved as .exr files – these were not tone mapped at this stage. Next time I will try processing from the ‘raw’ files - The three .exr files were stitched in the stitching software Autopano Pro and saved as a .exr file. I couldn’t do this before with the 32 bit version.
- This .exr panoramic file was tonemapped in Photomatix and saved as a 16 bit tiff file.
- This tiff was then edited in Photoshop (a little curves adjustment)and saved as a Jpeg file – this is what you see above (resized for the web).
For the third part I am still evaluation the software that I will use for the interactive tour.
Overall, an interesting exercise.
You can see the other garden panorama photographs in the panorama gallery and the standard photographs take this month in the garden gallery.