45 Photos Used in HDR Pano

[omniscapephotography]

Hi All,

Brandon just added a new post to our landscape photography tips blog which I think you'll find interesting. Let me know what you think!

Using HDR to Create "Turbulent Silk" - by Brandon Broderick

HDR was one of the first techniques I learned when I got into photography about 3 years ago. If you’re not familiar with HDR, I’ll do my best to sum it up. HDR or High Dynamic Range basically involves shooting the exact same scene at different exposures. Those exposures are then stacked on top of each other using HDR software. Once stacked, the images are tone mapped and voila, your HDR photo.




When tone mapping, you can adjust the strength of the HDR “effect”. I normally have it set quite low. High enough to show correctly exposed highlights and shadows in the same image, but not too high that it looks like a photo from another planet. Keep in mind almost every HDR I shoot is of natural areas so having the strength set too high isn’t necessary to produce the image I want. I don’t want it to sound like I’m against shooting HDR images with the strength set high, it’s just not my style.

Now that we’ve got a basic grasp of HDR, lets talk about panoramic photography. I think over the years panos have become one of my favourite types of photos to shoot. I find it’s a great way to give the viewer of the photo a pretty realistic idea of exactly where the photo was taken, sort of an “it feels like I’m there” feeling.

For those of you not familiar with panoramic photos, here’s a quick rundown. A panoramic photo is a number of photos that are shot in sequence of the same scene and stitched together to create one single photo. This can be done horizontally, vertically, tiled, or 360 degrees. A tripod is a must for panoramic photos, and preferably one with a level on it. My tripod for panos has a level on the tripod, on the tripod head, and I also have a bubble level that fits in my camera’s hot shoe to make sure I’m shooting perfectly level. I also make sure to overlap each photo by one third for seamless stitching. I’ve mentioned stitching a few times and I should clarify that I’m not manually lining these photos up. There are programs out there that do this for you and make shooting panos actually quite quick and easy. Shown below is the leftmost component of the Turbulent Silk Panorama.



Ok now comes the fun part. I figure I shoot a lot of HDR’s and a lot of panos, so why not combine them and shoot an HDR pano? But not just any HDR pano. A 45 photo HDR pano. That’s right, 45 photos were used to create this one shot. Normally when I shoot HDR’s I use 3 shots. One that’s 2 stops over exposed, one was 2 stops under exposed, and the third one is the correct exposure. This time I decided to change things up a bit.

For this pano I stitched 5 photos side by side. Each of those 5 photos is an HDR photo consisting of 9 exposures. The exposure values are: +0.5ev, +1.0ev, +1.5ev, +2.0ev, 0, -0.5ev, -1.0ev, -1.5ev, -2.0ev. I even have a hard time figuring out all those numbers I just listed so I’ll try and explain exactly what those mean. The + or - in front of each number indicates over exposed (+) or under exposed (-). And the number indicates how many stops the photo was over or under exposed. The 0 in between the over and under exposed values indicates the image that was shot at the correct exposure. All of those exposures were then combined into a single HDR photo and the 5 HDR photos were stitched together side by side to create the panoramic photo “Turbulent Silk”.

If you have any questions or comments about this latest blog entry, feel free to email me at brandon@omniscapephotography.com or reply to this thread and I’ll do my best to answer you.

Thanks for reading!

[Glayva]

Hi Geoff
First, what a beautiful image. Lovely tones, beautiful flowing silky water, sharp and well composed.

Thanks for sharing the technique with us.

[Photologyst]

Thanks very much. Great pixs!

Nice that you don’t tone-map over the top.

[omniscapephotography]

Much appreciated, glad you like them!

I told Brandon when Omniscape Photography was first launched that the Turbulent Silk Pano was my favorite of his collection. That was back when Turbulent Silk was known as "Panorama 2"

[kompressor]

Glad you posted this. I was curious about the process for this type of shot. As long as your HDR processing is the exact same for each stack, the pano will stitch together evenly, correct? You don't have to do any more tone-mapping once your stitching is complete, right?

[BrandonBroderick]

correct. Just make sure to keep the tone mapping settings the same for each shot and you shouldn't have to do anything after the stitching is done.

[derekspacelewis]

Great shot and nice detailed explanation. I love HDR but have yet to try a panorama, what are some of the better programs to use for the stitching?

Also I checked out your blog, and the other pictures are awesome, cant wait to see more from ya. TFS.

[BrandonBroderick]

Derek,

glad you enjoy the blogs! I use a program called Panorama Maker. It's from Arcsoft.

[derekspacelewis]

Originally Posted by BrandonBroderick

Derek,

glad you enjoy the blogs! I use a program called Panorama Maker. It's from Arcsoft.

Thanks for the reply Brandon, I'll have to check it out.

[WVCoalMiner]

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