Second sun II

View from valley. Thanks for comments,

Dude. Where have you been? This is amazing. I just looked thru your portfolio and all your stuff is breathtaking. A little on the unrealistic side, but since I'm not a purist, I like it. I noticed you used PS. I know a lot of people on photo.net are PS haters, but my thoughst are if you can make it look better, (not more realistic) but better, than I'm all for it. In the details you said "12 source images are manually stitched in PS" What does that mean? You used 12 shots and merged them with PS? Please explain. I would love to learn how to create stuff like this. Thanks.

 

Will

Well composed.

Will, your interpretation of my cryptic note is correct. I did not count the exact number of source images that eventually end up in the final image seen here.

 

I have >50 shots taken at this location intented for this image alone. I used one set of images for the upper half, all taken with a ND grad, and a whole another set of images for the lower half. I stitched "manually" each set separately, then combined two halves. Obviously, there were a lot more things needed to be fixed even after this step. The biggest problem by far was the trees on the upper half. I hate to see ND-grad transition on trees or lose much details (both shadows or highlights), it took a LOT of effort to minimize the loss of detail. I am not fully satisfied yet, but after a week of work, I am ready to give up.

Well, your work has paid off well.

Beautiful image!

Havn't seen this angle before. Nice job!

Dave

Great PS work Mehmet. I wouldn't be able to tell this one took 50 images to make if you didn't tell us. Unlike some of your other works, there're no dramatic sky formations here. It's a wonderful picture but everything looks "normal" (or you've made it look normal :). So I wonder why it took such an effort to get this image and why a Grad ND was needed in such a light condition. Would the reflection be too dark otherwise? I can see it's now actually a tad brighter than the real big rock up there.

Yuan, this is what happens when ND -grad used, otherwise, El Cap is too bright to yield any reasonable image. These images were taken with 0.9 ND grad alone but I also had another set, which is not used here, with 0.9 +0.6 ND grads stacked. Due to angles of sun and El Cap, the east face of El cap acts like a giant reflector in the early morning. Anyhow, this was not a easy panorama to shoot, yet, final recontruction was even more difficult due lens distortions.

 

Please note that this view is >180 degrees. Also due to tilting and the lens distortions, the relative size of objects may have been distorted as well.

Your work has certainly been worth it, Mehmet. This image is plain wonderful, a definite poster/framed picture on a wall... Breathtaking...

Jiri

Great work, great image..!

Wonderful to see other folks posting mosaics... something I've recently taken up. Is this over near Cathedral Beach?