Denali Dawn
A 7 image panorama of the view from our tent in Denali National Park Alaska. This brief view of Denali (Mount McKinley) was the best that we had on our 4-day backpack. The mountain is frequently covered in cloud and this summer was particularly cloudy and rainy in Alaska.
Panoramas are not well suited to viewing on Flickr, so I've provided a link to my website where you can zoom in on a full resolution version (16074 x 4108 = 66Mb) of the photograph.
Very High Resolution: www.marcshandro.com/panoramas/Denali_Dawn.htm
Notes: What gear to take and how to carry it on a 4-day backpack is a topic of endless fascination it seems for photographers. Thanks to Debbie for carrying the tent this time, I decided to go a bit heavier on this trip. Here's the photo gear I brought: D300, 18-200mm, 12-24mm, 200-400mm (heavy!), velbon carbon-fiber tripod, Really Right Stuff Omni-Pivot Package panormic head, ML-3 transmitter/reciever (ie. cable release), Jobo Gigavu Pro (120Gb), 3 charged batteries and 8Gb & 4Gb CF cards. To keep the camera handy while hiking with the pack on I've found that my Eagle Creek fanny pack worn in the front provides quick and easy access. The protection for the camera isn't stellar, but the ruggedness of the Nikon body & lenses hasn't produced any problems for me so far. This was the heaviest I've ever gone backpacking and it was good that we didn't have large distances or elevations to cover. The hardest day was probably just a few kilometers and maybe 400 meters of elevation, but the spongey tussocky tundra is a lot more tiring than hiking on established trails -- and much more enjoyable!
For this photograph, I used matrix metering and checked the the readings across the planned range of the image. I made a mental note of the lowest and highest shutter speeds selected by the camera for my f8.0 aperture I selected. Since the dynamic range in this case wasn't too extreme, I knew I could get reasonable results without having to think of HDR and taking multiple exposures for each of the seven images in this panorama. I then set my camera to manual mode at f8.0 and the fastest speed noted to expose the brightest part of the image "to the right" -- noting my histogram and not clipping any highlights. By doing this I have some easier options at post processing time.
I used Adobe Lightroom and Autopano Pro to produce the final image. The new gradient filter in Lightroom 2.0 is particularly useful. After doing the usual (white balance, exposure, color, sharpness, noise, and vignetting) edits, I used 2 gradient filters: -1 exposure compensation for the sky and snow and +1 exp for the grass in the foreground. After I got one of the seven images the way I liked I was able to synchronize these edits for the remaining 6 images. I could use the same edit settings for all 7 photos because I used the same camera setting for all 7 images and I also used a bubble level which kept everything aligned on the horizontal which enabled me to copy the gradient filter settings to all 7 images. The next step is to export these processed images out of Lightroom and then stitch them together automagically using Autopano Pro.
I've set up zoomify on my website for this image which allows examination at maximum resolution. Just click to zoom in and pan around like Google maps. Quite a handy tool and very easy to set up.
I'm quite happy with the results!
Note: You can license this image from Getty Images here.
Denali Dawn
A 7 image panorama of the view from our tent in Denali National Park Alaska. This brief view of Denali (Mount McKinley) was the best that we had on our 4-day backpack. The mountain is frequently covered in cloud and this summer was particularly cloudy and rainy in Alaska.
Panoramas are not well suited to viewing on Flickr, so I've provided a link to my website where you can zoom in on a full resolution version (16074 x 4108 = 66Mb) of the photograph.
Very High Resolution: www.marcshandro.com/panoramas/Denali_Dawn.htm
Notes: What gear to take and how to carry it on a 4-day backpack is a topic of endless fascination it seems for photographers. Thanks to Debbie for carrying the tent this time, I decided to go a bit heavier on this trip. Here's the photo gear I brought: D300, 18-200mm, 12-24mm, 200-400mm (heavy!), velbon carbon-fiber tripod, Really Right Stuff Omni-Pivot Package panormic head, ML-3 transmitter/reciever (ie. cable release), Jobo Gigavu Pro (120Gb), 3 charged batteries and 8Gb & 4Gb CF cards. To keep the camera handy while hiking with the pack on I've found that my Eagle Creek fanny pack worn in the front provides quick and easy access. The protection for the camera isn't stellar, but the ruggedness of the Nikon body & lenses hasn't produced any problems for me so far. This was the heaviest I've ever gone backpacking and it was good that we didn't have large distances or elevations to cover. The hardest day was probably just a few kilometers and maybe 400 meters of elevation, but the spongey tussocky tundra is a lot more tiring than hiking on established trails -- and much more enjoyable!
For this photograph, I used matrix metering and checked the the readings across the planned range of the image. I made a mental note of the lowest and highest shutter speeds selected by the camera for my f8.0 aperture I selected. Since the dynamic range in this case wasn't too extreme, I knew I could get reasonable results without having to think of HDR and taking multiple exposures for each of the seven images in this panorama. I then set my camera to manual mode at f8.0 and the fastest speed noted to expose the brightest part of the image "to the right" -- noting my histogram and not clipping any highlights. By doing this I have some easier options at post processing time.
I used Adobe Lightroom and Autopano Pro to produce the final image. The new gradient filter in Lightroom 2.0 is particularly useful. After doing the usual (white balance, exposure, color, sharpness, noise, and vignetting) edits, I used 2 gradient filters: -1 exposure compensation for the sky and snow and +1 exp for the grass in the foreground. After I got one of the seven images the way I liked I was able to synchronize these edits for the remaining 6 images. I could use the same edit settings for all 7 photos because I used the same camera setting for all 7 images and I also used a bubble level which kept everything aligned on the horizontal which enabled me to copy the gradient filter settings to all 7 images. The next step is to export these processed images out of Lightroom and then stitch them together automagically using Autopano Pro.
I've set up zoomify on my website for this image which allows examination at maximum resolution. Just click to zoom in and pan around like Google maps. Quite a handy tool and very easy to set up.
I'm quite happy with the results!
Note: You can license this image from Getty Images here.