"Meadow of Serenity"

This is a little different than my previous post. I took 4 vertical images at two different exposures, one for the sky and the second setting for the foreground, a total of 8 frames. I stitched the 4 brighter frames, then stitched the 4 darker frames, then manually blended the two resulting panos in Photoshop to complete the process. I feel blending is superior to using a grad filter because I have more control over the final effect. The best result is the file size, a TIFF that is capable of printing 24 inches wide and approximately 36 inches long with sharp detail. Thanks for stopping in and offering your impressions and please take time to view the Larger preview!

Thanks for your time and your observations. I appreciate your candor!

Mark... Fantastic, the level of detail and the richness of each color; as well as the depth it adds to the image is readily noticeable. You're gonna make me buy CS4 yet! :-)... Mike

 

 

I was jumping from one image to other, and settled here. All beautiful images. You reminding me to Monet. Beautifully done, excellent, colors, contrast, composition. Bravo, 10/10.

 

Cheers; Bela

Love the image. Thanks for the description. It helps us learn from your expertise.

I was just going to say that I love the image and can appreciate the experience of being there, but I must add that you've done very well on the stitching and blending.

Hello Mike, Bela, Larry and Stephen. Thanks for the comments. The stitching was easy Stephen, load four frames into CS3 (I haven't upgraded to CS4 yet Mike) and choose Photomerge. The hard part was rising at 5:30 am, driving 40 minutes to the location without coffee, hopping the barbed wire fence in the dark, rushing back to take my 4 year old daughter to pre-school and then blending the two resulting panos. Piece of cake! CS3's photomerge is truly amazing. I use a cheap $80 tripod without a level and it can blend them seamlessly. I do have a Gitzo in my radar screen on the distant horizon, but I can't justify that expense right now, especially when I haven't really needed it (I am mostly tired of looking like a geek with my little Slik travel tripod). For the minor difficulties involved here, I am truly satisfied with the look of this image. Thanks again!

Mark, I know that CS3 and CS4 can do a great job in stitching. I attended a NAPP workshop in which the instructor had simply aimed his camera (handheld) at all angles in the same general direction and took a dozen or more photos, and then he just let CS4 do the merge. The resulting image was perfectly aligned, with the margins showing the odd angles of the camera (i.e., it wasn't perfectly square or rectangular; some of the single shots had crossed the "boundary"). I talked with Art Wolfe a while back, and this is how he is now producing large (30" x 40" range) images. It doesn't require any special equipment (although one can spends hundreds of dollars on such equipment), and the results are what you got: a large image with incredible detail.

It's the "no coffee" that blows me away, Mark.

Very Impressionist feel. Lovely composition, and great detail. The early morning light is soft and sweet..

The powerful saturated flowers in the foreground, really catches the eye. Overall very nice lightning.

Absolutely beautiful, Mark! This version definitely addresses the concern I had with the earlier post. Given the enormous resolution, this would look great as a 24"x36" or even 30"x40" print.

This looked to be a pretty good spring for wildflowers.

 

Anish

Very nice Mark. I want to go there.

Thanks Michael, Claude, Yngve, Anish and Sean. Michael, I sometimes skip the coffee so I can concentrate on photography and not on finding a tree for relief (there are no trees out here, not that that would stop me). Once I got my daughter off to school, I made a full pot and sat down to quietly process these files. The perfect morning! Anish, I knew this would be more to your liking. I have a K10D which at 10 mega-pixels, renders a 57 meg file at 16 bits, or 28 megs once it is ready for output. This process of stitching roughly doubled my resolution after overlapping of each frame. I have already printed straight files to 22 inches wide with exceptional sharpness and detail, so this file should look quite good. The trick is to up res with bi-cubic smoother when re-sizing, then sharpen the piss out of it (which would look like over-sharpening at 100%), then make sure to eliminate the halo along the horizon or in places where it is obvious. One way is the mask the sharpening in those areas; another way is to paint it away with clone stamp set to either darken or lighten, depending on the type of halo. Always remember, when you sharpen an up-resed file, you have to use a larger radius setting when sharpening.

Mark - This is simple, and simply gorgeous! Interest throughout the image and of course, great detail. I have found that stitching using a zoom (vertically) has enable me to get a wide angle feel, with some moderate compression to get distant peaks (usually) a little more significant in the image, while retaining all of the fine detail near too far. To get the same from a single image, it would seem that one would have to crop the image a bit, and thereby loose some FG. With a zoom, DOF can be a problem so extreme zooms may not work as well. I'm not sure if you processed your Raw first, then stitched, or stitched the RAW files directly. I have found that stitching the RAW files directly does save some time and the results are pretty good. I'm not sure what RAW options are used, possibly the defaults that come up, or maybe the last used selections? That is the lazy part of me! Fine job, once again.

 

Best wishes, Harry

A great scene, very well handled and shot. A perfect reward for your morning's efforts, especially given the lack of caffine. Not sure I could do that....

 

Cheers,

Thanks Harry and Gary for checking in! Harry, I process the RAW files individually, well sort of. I process one of them, usually the brightest to make sure I am holding the highlights, then I select all and choose synchronize in ACR. This ensures that they are all handled with the same adjustments; and it goes without saying that I meter manually during capture and use the same settings for each frame. In this case, my aperture was set at F11 and remained throughout. The sequence then went like this: Shutter speed at .3, click, change to 1/20th, click, pan, click, change to .3, click, pan, click, change to 1/20th, click and so on. This reduces the number of times I have to change the shutter and keeps me from forgetting which setting I am at. As far as no coffee, Gary, I have weaned myself from full caffeinated coffee; instead I use half caffeinated. So I can get going if I don't have it, just hurts a little bit more!

It has all been said! All I can add is that I am absolutely gobsmacked with how beautiful this image is! One of your all time best, IMHO! Mystical, like something out of a fairytale...or Ireland. Well done, mon Ami! Cheers! Chris

Bear! How nice that you have stopped by. Ya know, I concur about this being one of my best. It may not rate as strongly as some others, but what do they know. Until now, it has been missing something very important for me; your stamp! I now consider it justified. Thanks for your kind words! BTW, this image also has brought me gifts from the class. Mike sent over a to go mug and a filter pack of coffee so I won't have to go without. Thanks Mike!

Yes. They are beautiful, all of them. Bravo.

 

Cheers; Bela

Thank you Bela, this is one of may favorites also!