mathewballard's photostream

Semifinalist in Sony's Panorama Photography contest! news.deviantart.com/article/116729/

Downtown Louisville is beautiful, especially at night with the lights making her glow. I've wanted to catch one of these moments for the longest time. Finally, one night in early June I set out on a journey to create this photo.
---
My second ever true panorama photo. For this one I had to take a small trip to the other side of the Ohio River into Indiana and find a way to get down to the river for the spot I wanted. I won't go into detail how I got there, because then I may implicate myself for something.

The night was hot and very humid and the ground where I stood was, for the most part, uneven and I was surrounded by brush. This made things challenging, because I wanted to hurry up and get things done since I was miserable, but I forced myself to take the time I need to get things right.

I took four photos to use for the pano, but only used three of them and then cropped out about half of the third one to even things up. I had to use a long exposure and after messing around with different times I finally settled on 3.6 seconds. Editing was done in both Lightroom (pre-pano stitching) and Photoshop (post-pano stitching) and all together I put about 2.5 hrs of work into this one.

Overall I'm very happy with the way it turned out, although I do wish I had done more to prepare myself, instead of just jumping right into it that night.

This past weekend me and my girlfriend went to the Raven Run Nature Sanctuary just outside of Lexington, KY. There we kept seeing all these random stone walls. This particular one stretched along a long portion of the trail we were on. I decided that I wanted to take a shot at creating a panorama.

So, handheld, I fired off five shots from my camera. Each time taking a mental not of a certain point of the wall to use as a reference for the next. Then later on I let Merge to Panorama in Photoshop CS3 work it's magic.

For the first time ever the feature really impressed me. I now have an urge to find more scenes for panorama photography.

In other news, this is the first photo I've uploaded in quite awhile. Last year my photography went down as I decided to put more time into my design skills. So I took a break from photography for the most part. This year, however, I've been getting the photography urge back and now I'm letting it become a bigger part of my life once again.

Sitting in a barn on a piece of long abandoned land sits a mustang cobra up on blocks. It was very sad to see such a great car sitting and rusting away like this.

In other news this was my first selective coloring photo in well over a year and the first that I have done with HDR.

One of many destroyed, abandoned cars sitting on abandoned property out in the middle of no where.

An old recliner and a bag of trash that sat in front of an old abandoned house just off the busy 31W highway.