"Head of the Rocks" Panorama, Scenic Byway 12, between Escalante and Cannonville, Utah
Merry Christmas everyone! I want to wish you and your families and friends a holiday season and coming year filled with joy and good cheer! To download a pdf on buying fine art photography, click here.
As for us, today we drove from Moab to Bryce Canyon City (which is really more like a village than a city…) along Scenic Byway 12. The scenery was so inspiring that we couldn’t help but keep stopping along the way. Somehow, a 4-hour drive turned into something like 8 hours up mountains and down into canyons, at times around hairpin turns with nothing but a road marker between us and the long tumble down. (I’m not so good with heights – it was a little scary at times. Don’t drive SB 12 in bad weather!)
So today’s photo of the day is a panorama from “Head of the Rocks,” between Escalante and Cannonville at sunset. I haven’t done very many panoramas before, so I’m very pleased at how this turned out. I stitched this panorama together from five photos, each overlapped by at least 1/3 of the image. I actually shot 10 or so photos but haven’t had time yet to merge the others in.
Panoramas can be tricky depending on the lighting – as you’re covering such a large part of the sky, if the lighting is different from one side to another, it can be difficult to blend the images together. Today, though, with the sun behind me, I had a nice, even sunset glow across the sky, so it was easy sailing! Again, I shot each image with my Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera and Canon 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens on a Manfrotto 190CXPRO3 3-Section Pro Carbon Fiber Tripod with Manfrotto 486RC2 Compact Ball Head. With a focal length of 95mm, ISO 400, f/8, and shutter speed 1/40 seconds, I also focused manually to prevent the auto focus from shifting between each shot. I adjusted exposure, contrast, and saturation in Lightroom 2 and stitched together the shots in Photoshop CS4 (File ->Automate->Photomerge). Do you like it?
Hi again Tom!
Yes, I LOVE HDR landscapes! I did a blog post not long ago about HDR, and I posted several sample HDR landscapes. On this Utah trip, so far, my Day 8 (Zion National Park), Day 7 (Zion National Park), Day 6 (Zion National Park), and Day 4 photos (Bryce Canyon) are HDR. I guess that makes half my photo-a-days so far HDR. I guess you like HDR?
Hi again:
Have you tried shooting the landscapes as a HDR photo?
Tom Sullivan
Hi Chris, are you referring to when you shoot multiple images, each focused at a different point, and then when you combine them together in the computer, you get super depth-of-field? I haven’t been doing much macro photography recently, so I’ve never tried it, though I know about it. I haven’t found so much of a need with my landscape photography since I can already get a lot of depth of field with a wide angle lens and small aperture, and long distance to my subject. What about you?
Have you tried shooting focus stacking at higher (more closed) apertures? Works great with wide angle lenses.