The past few weeks, I have been working on some senior portraits for some people. First off, I did some portraits for a friend around September, however, he came back to me and wanted some more prints, so I worked with him and his mom to get those ordered and processed adequately. It ended up taking quite a bit of time, getting all of the images processed to the right size, etc.

I also had another student come to me for senior portraits. Gabby wanted some new ones, because her other studio was too expensive to get graduation announcement photos, so she wanted different ones for those. So she had me take some for her. We went to Hayden Lake and got some great ones down by the water. We decided that since so many people go downtown for portraits, that we would try some other areas.

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Last week, I decided to create a giant panorama of Hayden Lake (map below). I have seen them done, rather spectacularly, of such events of President Obama’s inauguration, and other big events. I have even tried doing it myself in the past of Lake Coeur d’Alene. This one was by far more difficult than the last one though. I decided that I will never do it again, unless I get one of their machines that automates the process.

Essentially, I went down to the Hayden Lake dike, and placed my camera on a tripod and started shooting images from left to right. I ended up shooting nearly 150 images. There was some difficulty at the shoot, from the fact that the lighting was continuously changing, and there were some rather dark areas, so I had to slightly change the exposure. This, unfortunately, caused some difficulties when piecing it together in the computer.

After shooting, I put all the images into Lightroom, and did minor adjustments, and converted it from RAW. This took a while, but I was able to just leave the computer alone as it worked. Then I had to piece it together in Photoshop… which proved to be the most difficult part. The file was so large, it took nearly 1 hour each time to save it.

The next trouble occurred when I realized that the Gigapan uploader has tons of difficulties uploading large files, and always fails. It takes for ever, and always fails.

So, I sized it down from approx. 100,000 px wide, to 40,000 px wide, I was finally able to get it to successfully upload. It took nearly all night, totaling nearly 1gb for the jpeg.

Anyway, I am slightly disappointed as to how it turned out blotchy, but when I attempted to fix that aspect, I realized that it could take months. I tried the Auto-blend tool in photoshop, but I started it at 2:30 pm, and it tried until 5:30 when it failed and gave the message “Not enough RAM.” I nearly punched my computer. I decided that I should just get one of their machines if I want to do more of these.

Center of map

Hayden Lake Dike

Location of camera

Honey Suckle Marina

Left side of image

Hayden Lake Marina

Right side of image

I was driving to take some pictures and I had this crazy idea to put the tripod through the moon-roof of my car and take some pics. I had seen this idea on dpchallenge a while ago, and decided to attempt it for myself. I drove out the Hayden Lake road, and stopped at the dike. I then had my brother hold the tripod as it stuck out the roof. I had the remote dangling down. I set the exposure (which ended up being the demise of many pictures because the lighting changed so much. After I started moving, I realized that I couldn’t go much above 15 mph, which got really annoying to the people who were unfortunate enough to get behind me. But it ended up being just a short distance before I could turn out and take it down. The strap, which I forgot to take off, ended up flapping around and eventually pulling the remote cord out, so I couldn’t take anymore pictures.

The first image turned out great in my mind, compared to the second one. The second one had terrible trouble with lens flare and I tried correcting it, but to no avail. So I just posted it as an example of one that didn’t turn out. I really wasn’t shooting (no pun intended) to have it look like my inspiration photo, but rather to create an image showing the road. But none the less, I would like to attempt again some other time to create one like the image on DPC

I used my Canon 50D and an EF-S 18-55 (that I stole from my brother). Although not the greatest lens, it was nice because it is the widest we own. Below is the exposure info:

• Shutter: 1/10^th
• Aperture: f/22.0
• Focal Length: 18mm
• ISO: 100

When transferred to the computer, I realized that a lot of them weren’t exposed properly. I really should have used an auto exposure setting to have avoided this.

Below are a few images shot during the setup. As you can see, it was exposed correctly here.

I’ll probably post an image of the setup here in a second… I just don’t have it on hand at the moment.

This is the contact sheet of the images

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Location of these photos