My
local Flickr group had a meetup this weekend out at Piha on the west coast about 40mins from Auckland. We had a great afternoon and took some great shots.
I've always been into creating horizontal panormamic mosaic images but have been experimenting with vertoramas lately and thought I'd share the process I went through to create this latest image. I've split the tutorial into 2 parts due to forum posting limitations.
For those who have'nt figured it out yet, a vertorama is simply a panorama comprising 3 or more images stitched or blended vertically.
In this shot we were dealing with the Kite Kite (
proun; kitty kitty) falls and I was shooting from only about 8-10 meters in front of the waterfall rockface. In addition there was a significant dynmaic range between the darks shadows of the rocks to the highlights of the sky overhead.
So, after selecting an appropriate exposure for the different parts of the scene to make sure the important details would be captured correctly, I set my camera on a steady tripod (a must) and took my first shot to take in the foreground water and rocks.
Image 1 - Foreground detail
The second to takes in more of the waterfall and surrounding foliage
Image 2 - Middle detail
and my third to take the top of the waterfall, ridgeline and sky.
Image 3 - Top detail
As you can see the images were overlapped by quite a bit as I like to play it safe, but generally you should aim for 20-30% overlap if possible to make stitching and blending easier.
You will also note in image 3 that the sky is over-exposed, so I took a couple more shots to expose for the sky.
Image 4 - Sky exposure
Blending and poste processing techniques in part 2.