Another week has passed, another process post is here. For today I chosen a little older photo, one from start of this year (as you can easily see by the snow in it :)). As I no longer have the PSD file of it (I started keeping them only few weeks after I edited this one) I will go more into the overall steps I took to get it. So here goes.

First of all the finished photo itself. You can see, it’s quite a huge panorama, with dimensions of 19649 x 5237 which makes this photo around 120Mpix.

You can view a zoomable version of this panorama in the Panorama section on this blog, or directly here.

I knew I wanted this photo fro a long time before I took it, as this is the best view of Bratislava. I was just missing the needed equipment. But sometime before I took it, I bought the Nodal Ninja 4 panoramic head. And with the help of it, I could make this pano without any problem. Here is the setup I was using:

So it was my Canon 5D mark II, with the Canon 16-35mm lens, wired remote, the bubble level all on the Nodal ninja 4 head.

Overall I took 8 shots, all 6 bracket series. I imported them all into Lightroom, where I did few minor corrections. First of all I enabled lens correction. This is very important when doing a panorama, as it removes the vignetting from the photo and so helps it to be blended more seamlessly. I also removed the chromatic aberrations and corrected white balance in Lightroom.

After that I exported all the 48 images as 16bit Tiff files and loaded them into PTgui. I merged them into a panorama and saved as their separate blended planes (check out my HDR panoramas tutorial for a more detailed explanation)

After that I used Bridge to load all the files into one Photoshop file as separate layers. You can do this also manually, file by file, but using Bridge is much faster.
In Photoshop I blended the images, and corrected the angle. As I said, I haven’t saved the file, so no screenshot here, but instead here is a piece of the panorama taken from the 50% zoom

and from a 100% zoom.

Continue to the full post to see two of the original 0EV exposures.

Today I was joined for a little evening photo-shooting by Marek Kijevský from Marek Kijevský photography and his lovely wife. To bad they visited Bratislava so late in the year, as it was quite cold and cloudy. I think we got some usable photos, but probably nothing spectacular. Same with the photo I’m sharing today. I really like the colors on the bridge and that you can see few of the stones under the water, but I’m still missing a better blue hour sky here. A dark blue would looks so nice. Still good to know that they changed the bulbs on the bridge. They all look white to the eye, but have a distinct color to the light they provide. It’s really something worth revisiting.

This is a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine from 7 exposures and the blended with original exposures in Photoshop.

I just have the feeling like I’m looking at a toy here, not a city shot. And It would be really enhanced by a tilt-shift lens, I just don’t have one (and I’m not a big fan of the fake tilt-shift effect anymore). I still really like how the buildings here create something like and S curve, even if it’s not so dominant.

This is a manual blend from 3 shots, taken from the Three towers in Bratislava. I think not many people from Bratislava will recognize the buildings here, as you almost never see them from this side :)

Also big thanks to Lucka for letting me occupy her balcony again :)

As usually for the All saints day, I went to a nearby cemetery to take a few photos. With all the candles it looks so stunning, that for a moment you can almost forget where you are. I think photos of pumpkins and masks would be a little more cheerful, but for that I would probably have to be in a different country. And at least this is more spiritual.

This is a HDR created from 6 shots in Oloneo Photoengine and then finished in Photoshop.

So it’s not all just landscapes and architecture here, for today I chosen a little different photo. So yes, sometimes there are also people in my photos. It’s a nice change from time to time.

I took this one in the Botanical garden in Bratislava, where I did a little photo-shoot with Alexandra. I love shooting with natural light, and it’s the same here. It was a lovely sunny day, and the sun gave a great back-light, which I countered with a weak fill in flash from the front. I also used the Canon 70-200mm F2.8 lens, which is just so great for these type of photos. It’s very sharp and also gives a very lovely bokeh. Of course this is not HDR, this was edited mostly in Lightroom, with few minor tweaks and sharpening in Photoshop.