(I recommend clicking on the image to see the full-res version)
On Wednesday, I went to Fenway Park in Boston, MA for the Red Sox vs. White Sox game. Not great seats, so I wasn't going to get any
awesome game shots, so instead I decided to challenge myself and only take the Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens on my 40D. It's an amazingly sharp lens and I love shooting with it, but it makes it tough in an environment like that when you can't really move around too much to get the shot you want framed the way you want. And what I wanted was a nice wide shot of Fenway Park, but to do that would require that I back up into Cambridge with that lens. So I decided to shoot a multi-shot panorama instead.
First, was getting the metering right. I think it's REALLY important when shooting panoramas that you're going to stitch together to get the exposure settings exactly the same on all of them and that means shooting in manual. With no image stabilization on that lens, I wanted to get the shutter at 1/125s or faster since I was shooting hand-held (used 1/160s) and at an f/stop that was more in the "sweet spot" for the lens. f/5.6 is really sharp. I took a couple of shots of the center of the field and settled on ISO640 as being pretty good. Into manual mode and set shutter speed, aperture, and ISO where I wanted it.
Then I just found a good spot without people in the way and slowly rotated myself taking shot after shot (with the camera rotated 90 degrees, in "portrait" mode), 12 shots in all, making sure that there was plenty of overlap between shots.
For post-processing, I tweaked them all the same in Adobe Lightroom. Just a little bump up of clarity and vibrance and a touch of noise reduction. I exported the 12 shots as full quality (100%) jpeg and then fired up
Autostitch to stitch them together. That program does a great job of hiding the stitch lines. I'm hard pressed to find them in this image. The only change I made to the default settings was to increase the size to 50% of original (9400x2066 finished image) and change the jpeg output quality to 100 (and bump up the memory setting so it doesn't run out of memory crunching on a big image). I re-imported the resulting image into lightroom and did a little cropping and straightening and then output it again at slightly lower resolution.
So there you have it. Any feedback (pro or con) is more than welcome. In hindsight, I probably should have gone back and done it again once the game actually started, though I might had a hard time trying to find a good shot to shoot from.
Happy shooting!
-Steve