What’s Your Preference?

sdo · #1 (**permalink**) 08-29-2009, 03:59 AM

(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

03mach1speed · #2 (**permalink**) 08-29-2009, 05:53 AM

Great pic, love the panoramas.... New to photography so I'm the last one to be able to offer advice.... I'll be trying autostitch, thanks.........

A-Lyn20 · #3 (**permalink**) 08-29-2009, 06:30 AM

Absolutely LOVE the picture! I'm a huge fan of Fenway and the Sox, so this was a treat to see. I'll have to try something similar when I go on the 8th!

Gonzo13 · #4 (**permalink**) 08-29-2009, 09:56 AM

That is an amazing shot. I can actually see the seats that I was at when I was there in June.

sdo · #5 (**permalink**) 08-29-2009, 12:52 PM

Thank you for the kind words. I'd actually done another one at a different game last year too:

I'm going to print that one at some point (about 6-ft wide I think), but I need to do some more Photoshop work to it to get rid of the girl who was walking along as I was rotating and taking shots.

I suppose that's another good lesson to be had here... if you're going to take a series of shots like this, do it at least a couple of times, especially if there's potentially moving objects (people) in your shot. Maybe a good way would be to take the panorama shots in one direction and then do it again in the other direction (I tend to go left to right for apparantly no good reason).

-Steve

amellor · #6 (**permalink**) 08-29-2009, 01:22 PM

Great shot! Thanks for describing in detail how you did this. I love panoramas, and my old point and shoot had a "panorama assist" feature that really helped make them, but my new T1i does not.

Harksie Photos · #7 (**permalink**) 08-29-2009, 06:34 PM

Awesome capture. I absolutely love the sox also. This is almost like being there. What a treat. Thanks so much. Truly a nice treat for all of us red sox faithful.