Radcliffe Camera - from low and high

[dubaiphil]

A couple of panoramas (7 shots for the ground shot, 13 shots for the high shot) of Radcliffe Camera in Oxford.

1.



2.

[Shadowman]

Nice captures.

[Nicks Pics]

Doing this with panoramas sounds like a difficult task. The B&W conversions are very nice, you didn't apparently loose detail in the sky. The second image is a great view. I would like a little extra space at the top so that the very peek was not quite so close to the top of the frame. Do you have any more room at the top in the originals?

[dje]

Both very good shots Phil, well crafted and well composed. I wonder whether a little more contrast may be in order, particularly in the second shot ? - personal taste I suppose.

Dave

[dubaiphil]

Thanks Dave - I think I may add a grad ND effect to the sky in the second shot - as for contrast, I'll have a play. These are a work in progress and took a while to stitch and convert last night so I didn't get them uploaded to my zenfolio site until 1:30am - always worth a second visit after burning the candle at both ends! Time flies when you're adding vertical control points in PTGui!

[dubaiphil]

Doing this with panoramas sounds like a difficult task. The B&W conversions are very nice, you didn't apparently loose detail in the sky. The second image is a great view. I would like a little extra space at the top so that the very peek was not quite so close to the top of the frame. Do you have any more room at the top in the originals?

Hi Nick

The original stitch had the Radcliffe Camera centred in the frame but there was some annoying construction work in the bottom left of the frame so I went for an off centred crop.

When shooting for a panorama like this I'm always checking the exposure in the brightest area of the scene first and locking my settings for it. In this case the sky was the brightest so I was shooting at 1/100th, f8 and ISO200. Then the next caveat is to take auto WB off and use a preset (I used cloudy WB as it was fully overcast). Autofocus wasn't an issue as I was using a manual focus lens at infinity.

Due to the area covered it was quite a sweep from bottom right to bottom left, then up for a left to right sweep. As the bottom sweep was angled steeply downwards the bottom layer of the pano required 6 shots and the top layer required 7 shots with a roughly equal overlap.

Once stitched and before placing vertical control points this creates a flat image with a large amount of distortion and even allowing for extra headroom you can end up cutting the tops of buildings if you're not careful. It's always better to take extra shots to be sure and once straightened I just managed to get the top of the Radcliffe Camera in the final image.

So in short, very difficult when shooting to ensure that you have enough sky in your images to get everything in the final image when it's straightened, especially when you're shooting a scene with a lot of height and horizontal field of view.

[deetheturk]

Hi Phil, I'm back in Scotland freezing my parts off at the moment, so only looking at this on my iPad, and both look great to me, well done mate!

[dubaiphil]

Thanks David

For the pixel peepers out there, here are a couple of larger versions:

[bnnrcn]

They are both nice, I find #2 great

[Nicks Pics]

Hi Nick

The original stitch had the Radcliffe Camera centred in the frame but there was some annoying construction work in the bottom left of the frame so I went for an off centred crop.

When shooting for a panorama like this I'm always checking the exposure in the brightest area of the scene first and locking my settings for it. In this case the sky was the brightest so I was shooting at 1/100th, f8 and ISO200. Then the next caveat is to take auto WB off and use a preset (I used cloudy WB as it was fully overcast). Autofocus wasn't an issue as I was using a manual focus lens at infinity.

Due to the area covered it was quite a sweep from bottom right to bottom left, then up for a left to right sweep. As the bottom sweep was angled steeply downwards the bottom layer of the pano required 6 shots and the top layer required 7 shots with a roughly equal overlap.

Once stitched and before placing vertical control points this creates a flat image with a large amount of distortion and even allowing for extra headroom you can end up cutting the tops of buildings if you're not careful. It's always better to take extra shots to be sure and once straightened I just managed to get the top of the Radcliffe Camera in the final image.

So in short, very difficult when shooting to ensure that you have enough sky in your images to get everything in the final image when it's straightened, especially when you're shooting a scene with a lot of height and horizontal field of view.

Thanks Phil, I appreciate the tips on panoramas. I learned something. It makes sense to lock exposure and use a constant WB.

[wtlwdwgn]

Nice work on these. They're both very good but I like #2 best. B&W was a good choice too.