[b.van_der_dylan]

A few observations so far on my attempts at Pano. The stitching is probably the easiest part as long as I keep my focal length at 20mm and not use my favourite length of 10mm. At 10mm the overlapping gets tricky and I have noticed ghosting. It could also be due to me not using a pano head but a normal tripod and moving each shot by eye.

Comp wise I am still thinking too much in single shot mode. This one I thought the tree on lhs would be more prominent.

Exposure is more difficult. If I exposure for sky only I find the fg is too dark especially when taking shots near the sun side. I shoot in manual , set camera to manual focus and leave it , leave aperture at what you want and then just adjust shutter speed to get the exposure you want trying to keep it the same over the whole pano. This is a 7 shot vertical pano and each shot I took two - one for sky and one for fg. I shot in raw and then adjusted each sky and fg by eye in raw software. Then converted to jpegs.

In cs2 I overlayed two shots and created layer mask and pulled a grad.Then stitching and then more adjustments on cs2. Long process but I am sure there is a quicker way - getting in as good as possible in the field will I think save even more time

All c&c welcome

[Markulous]

Nicely put together - and resultant image looks good with that lovely light

Maybe a little too 50:50 but I know how difficult it is to get the whole thing to work!

[JMitchell]

Nice shot, great reds, and you managed the exposure very well as usual

[Charlotte]

Forgetting for a few seconds how much work went into this - otherwise I wouldn't have the heart to critique it fully (i.e. including neg's) - my first impression is that the image is underexposed + has a red-orange cast which is rather too strong for my taste, particularly on the left half.

The composition is not bad, but I would like to see some FG rather than a dip in the middle that's almost disappearing out of the bottom of the frame.

I'm not going to get any more detailed or picky than that, 'cos I realise that pano's are tricky to get 'right'.

I will say that I do like the sky + also the light reflecting off the water - those two things really make this shot for me

Anyway, those are my thoughts, good work, keep it up + let's see some more

[b.van_der_dylan]

thanks all.

[Charlotte]

Just had a thought re: the "underexposure" thing I mentioned, which is not - on looking again - underexposure but rather low contrast. What I thought might be causing this is glare, seeing as you were up high whereas the sun was low. The first question would be "did you use a hood?" I see there's no actual flare, but I do think it's the angle of sun to the camera (on the vertical plane) that's giving the low contrast effect. Perhaps if the sun were a little higher in the sky ... but then you wouldn't have got those lovely colours in the sky. Anyway, just some more thoughts for you on this one

[b.van_der_dylan]

thanks Charlotte - food for thought on contrast point. That what I love about photography - plenty time to go back at re examine shots .No hood used . Think I'll go back and re look at raws maybe I can comment better after that. cheers Andrew