Abandoned children's play area behind former military housing.

This is the rear area of an abandoned Army base housing area on former

Ft. Ord Army base. 12 exposures blended then stitched. I greatly

appreciate your thoughts. I try not to overdo the HDR look too much.

Thanks

... especially with all the different exposures. Do you seam all the different versions and then do the HDR process? Can't imagine the complexity of doing it the other way. BTW, Mark, I lived in this housing area when I was five years old! My father was stationed at Fort Ord, and then we moved out to Ralston Drive. Amazing to see this place so many years later.

Dennis, thanks for your comments. This was a time consuming process to say the least. Not to mention that I am pretty new to this process. This was a total of 12 exposures. Three each of four different frames. I processed each of the frames in HDR then stitched together the four resulting images. I then layered a stitch of the normal non-HDR exposure over the first and blended it in the needed areas. After that quite a bit of touching up in PS resulting in a >200mb file. A lot of work. Facinating that you used to live there. The whole base pretty much looks like this now and much of it has already been demolished to make way for housing. There is also a CSU campus there now as well and a recently finished Shopping center (box store type). Quite a lot has changed. I'm trying to capture as much of it as I can before it is gone forever. There are a few other pictures from the base in my folio and many more to come. Thanks for stopping by and sharing some history. Btw what years were you there?

... I'm not sensitive about my age:) I lived there in 1954. I remember it being a smart, clean, and efficient encampment, full of the wooden buildings with soldiers marching about. I remember my father's building had rocks lining the walkway from the road to the front door, as did many of the others in the area. It was the first of many posts that I can clearly remember, anything before that is just a collection of fragments.

 

You've got far more patience in the processing than I do, having never been able to successfully combine HDR's of the panoramas after tone mapping. And then again, I've always had problems doing the HDR after the stiching. I like the way you've described your process, maybe I'll give that a try and post the result. Thanks for the shot, and for the stroll through memory lane.

There is something really eerie about this image. More than just the feeling of abandonment. I can't put my finger on it, but I like it.

 

The stitched images show a bit. (particulary in the variation of the skies.) I have always found the skies to be the most difficult area to blend perfectly. I don't know if you are using CS3, but the blending function in this new version of PS is really good.

 

Thanks for describing the process. I have quite a few stitched panoramas in my collection, but have never done the HDR method you describe. Like Dennis, you have given me something to think about . . . and try. Thanks.

Drew, I am using PS7 actually which doesn't have really any tools to do splicing or HDR (unless i am just missing something). I use photomatix to blend and panorama maker to stitch. I find that it is better to blend first rather than try to blend 3 or 4 stitches because they don't always stitch the same and then you run into problems with alignment. Thanks for you comments. I did have trouble with the sky in this one and tried to blend it best I could after in PS. The stitch on the left 2/3 could certainly use some more work.

Mark, very passable hdr pano here... I like how you kept the tonemapping realistic and didn't let it get out of hand. Yes, that sky looks like it caused some trouble.... I am still using photomatix even though there are other good options out there now. And CS3 has a stitcher that seems excellent to me. Keep on shooting these!