Death Valley Sunrise

Comments and ratings appreciated.

I really like the strong forground and want to study it, but my eye is constantly drawn back to the warmer brighter colors in the top of the frame. There is something about those colors that distract me from what I really want to look at. It's almost as if you have two different subjects competing for my attention.

J. Scott Schrader's comment sum's up my feelings as well. Great picture!

I'm intrigued to know how you used four shots in this image. I will be visiting Death Valley in June this year, and will be very pleased indeed if I obtain anything this good.

The picture is composed of 4 horizontal shots.

Each shot was focused at a different distance so that the closest and farthest points were kept sharp.

I used panorama tools (free but the best software for this) to join the photos. I used the PTGui interface to panorama tools.

The pictures were just taken with a normal ballhead, instead of one that rotates around the nodal point of the lens, but since there were not near and far objects overlapping it works fine.

Thanks Ian. Basically a method to increase depth of field and field of view then. Looking forward to seeing more of your work...

Besides increasing the depth of field it increases the resolution of the final image and increases the field of fiew. With the Canon D30, a 17 mm lens is like a 28mm on 35mm film, so an increased field of view can be useful.

Beautiful work

un!be!lie!va!ble!

at first glance, this is an intriguing shot, yet it is helpfull to keep in mind that we are viewing it on a computer screen at a very small size. this computer simulated "picture" would never withstand an enlargement, and thus comes across as very garish and cheap. to properley execute this shot ( and i say shot not shots) you would need a Hasselblad superwide, or a schneider super angulon on a view camera. Im not against digital per se, but I believe that it should be done in a tastefull artistic manner.

I have enlarged this picture to 16x20 and had it printed on a lightjet. The print is about the quality of a 645 print enlarged to 16x20. Definetly better then a 35mm image enlarged to 16x20 but not the same as a 4x5. It is also has almost zero noise.

 

Since you can not see it with you own eyes, you may not believe it, but it makes a very good enlargement up to about 16x20.

 

I have printed pictues enlarged to this size from 6x6, 35mm scanned at 4000dpi, and now from the D30. The D30 pictures made from combined shots are more similar to the 6x6 then the 35mm. YMMV.

Ian, I think this is a great photo. No matter how it was created. To me it works well and looks stunning. And that is all that matters. I disagree that the warm tones of the mountains are distracting. To me, they are complementing the cool blue tones. Without the mountains, the photo is interesting, but quite unspectacular. That the eye is drawn to the mountains is not an effect of their color alone, but an effect of the salt crusts and how they lead your eye. The whole image is designed to make your eye wander and end up in the distance. The continuous sharpness helps achieving this. And yet, the foreground is interesting enough to get your attention back and the visual journey through the picture begins anew.

 

The stitching is very well done (at least, as I can judge from this image size) and as long as any technique let's you get what you envision then go for it. As your photo proves, you don't need a 4x5 to properly execute a shot like this. They only important thing is artistic vision and photographic skill, which also includes photoshopping. I know some people would like to call it "imaging skill" instead.

 

So, is it a photograph or an image? Who cares - it's beautiful and that is all that matters. Congratulations on a great photo.

It's a magnificent achievement. You will always have detractors when there is new technology. I am sure the painters loathed the early photographers work as it was then all too easy to capture images. Keep it up and let's see more such artful manipulations.