
Originally Posted by
David Kennedy
Brian,
Others have commented on the strength of the composition but I just wanted to reinforce that the sweeping curve in the foreground propels the eye into the image and the actual curving river below is what makes it work so well.
That said, I was highly confused by your comments about putting this image together, and made me worry that you might have made too much work for yourself. The first thing that I might question is whether the combination of 36 images was necessary when the working focal length is 16mm.. I've assembled panoramas as large as 60 images, but whenever I work with that many "parts to a whole," it's because I was using a telephoto lens to capture lots of small details. For an image such as this, a 24-70 mounted vertically and somewhere between eight and ten captures might have created a similar effect without the workload.
As for post-processing, I do hope for the sake of your sanity you didn't hand stitch 36 images!!! I've been a fan of AutoPano for a few years now, but I finally tried CS3's PhotoMerge and I'm actually shocked at how good it is--even on fully automatic. When it first came out in CS2 it was unusable...
It sounds like you were trying to do an HDR-pano blend, which is certainly difficult and would require some work manually. But that doesn't explain the highlight that Robert pointed out. The best way to do HDR-pano's that I've found is to process the HDR frame-by-frame first, and then stitch the resulting HDR frames together. It does take a while, though, and you have to be absolutely consistent with the settings in every single capture.
Perhaps if you could explain a little bit more about what you did for this one in post, we could all help you on how to make life a little easier next time. But as I suggested at the beginning, for all the hard work, the product is nice.