This one started out as a test. I wanted to see how far I can go with panorama photography. The image shows 360 degrees horizontal and about 170 degrees vertical - Means, it covers a full turn and pretty much a view from my feet to straight upwards. The reason why those clouds seem to form an arc is due to distortion. This can't really be avoided, as I had to literally stretch a 3 d real life view into a 2 d photograph. All panoramas show this effect to a certain degree. It's very obvious in most astro images, showing the Milkyray as an arc, rather than its real straight line shape. The tech background: I used a Canon EOS 6 d full frame camera and a Sigma 24 mm ART lens. I also used a sturdy tripod with a special panorama head (a manual one, as I don't like automatic ones) I shot, all in all, 120 images in portrait orientation, in 4 rows of 30 images each. This means, 30 images of the sky, each one a few degrees clockwise to the last, till I was back to the start point, then mounting the camera lower, same process, and so fort. The tricky part for the shooting itself was to be fast enough to get the full scene. As this was a sunset, I had only a few minutes from "still bright" to "nearly dark". I had about 5 seconds per picture, including adjustments, to shoot the whole series within about 10-15 minutes. Having all those images, they needed to be "evened", so they were all looking virtually the same in terms of light - none much darker or brighter than the others. Then they went into special stitching software to be combined to one big image. Due to long shooting times and some possible alignment issues, there were, of course, errors in this big image, like clouds (as they moved a lot within 10 minutes), steps in the horizon, lighting stripes in some of the seams etc. Those errors needed to be corrected in editing software (I use Photoshop), as well as overall noise reduction and contrast adjustments. You see, panoramas like this look pretty, but there's many hours of hard work involved. The camera itself has a 21 megapixel resolution, the final image sports 223 megapixel at 122 MB. It could be printed in a size to cover the side of a house, without losing detail. Below you find a small portion of this, just to show the level of detail. Of course this image is available as a printed version, please contact me if you're interested: photos@wernerkaffl.com For the image below, I used 16 of the original images from the panorama shown above.
This one is not a crop of the panorama, but an entirely new stitched version, hence it shows the water pool to the right in full, not cut in half as in the panorama. The level of detail is the same in both images, if you had the opportunity to zoom in to 100% resolution (of course you can't, as they have been downsized for publishing)
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