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

Darkness – the absence of light. Our eyes trick us during the night. According to our eyes, there is no light – no color – nothing. Photography opened up a view of the dark world, known more frequently as Night.

The above image was shot on the dock at the Honeysuckle Marina on Hayden Lake in Idaho. It was nearly black, but with the help of a slow shutter speed, I was able to capture the colors of the bay adjacent to the docks. As you can see, the lake has started freezing over due to the incredibly cold weather recently.

Exposure:

• Shutter Speed: 30 sec.
• Aperture: f/9
• ISO: 100

This week, I was feeling incredibly uninspired so I had some difficulty coming up with ideas for this week. So I did the logical thing… I did a motion blur of the US-95 and Prairie Ave. intersection. I drove down to the bank next to the intersection, and busted out my tripod and 50D, set the exposure, and out popped this masterpiece (you can bow to me later, I know, you’re just in shock right now).

Exposure:

• Shutter: 20 sec.
• Aperture: f/22
• ISO: 100

I was experimenting with some new filters this week, so after converting from RAW, I threw some Topaz on this pic and then changed the blending mode to soft light to reduce the effects so it wouldn’t be way too fake. Then I ran some high pass (desatted, on softlight) over the image to give it that nice over-edited look.

Finally, I made a fancy animation, because thats the cool thing to do.

Exposure same as above.

While I was out, I shot a panorama of Hayden Lake. This is below.
[RAW]

View Panorama Larger[/RAW]

This panorama consists of 6 images, taken at 30 seconds each, meshed together with photoshop. Because I was out on the dock at Honeysuckle Marina, there was some slight camera movement in the photo, this isn’t too noticeable at smaller sizes, but if you view it full size it becomes more prominent.

Finally, here is the contact sheet.

[RAW]

Stop Light Before and After[/RAW]