It was a nice weekend afternoon, so my wife and I decided to hike up Shelving Rock Mountain (along with 25 lbs of wiggling one year old on my back).  We have hiked there before, and observed a great view, but missed the even better unobstructed panoramic view of Lake George and the Adirondacks only a short walk away.  Because I was carrying my son on my back, I opted to go light on the camera gear and only had a 50mm lens.  That wasn’t going to stop me from capturing the view! 27 shots (9×3) and 120mp later, and I had the shot you see here.

original stitched photo

I assembled the panorama with Photoshop CS5 and then had to cut it down to 1/4 the original size in order to work with it because my machine was so bogged down.  There were a few edges that didn’t quite get filled in and content aware fill really saved the day here.  In retrospect, while it would have been nice to have had a wide lens up there, I’m glad I took the 50 because it forced me to think a little creatively to come up with the shot I wanted.

If you want to see some stunning panoramic photography of the Adirondack region  I suggest you check out Carl Heilman.  I have one of his works hanging on my living room wall.

I set up with my Canon Rebel XTi, Sigma 10-20, a 2 stop hard edge graduated neutral density (GND) filter, my tripod, and my homemade remote shutter trigger and went to town. Every time I go out and shoot a sunset, I am reminded that I really wish I had a 3 stop GND filter, but I am able to make due with the 2 stop one plus a little bit of post processing. I wanted a long exposure, so I also added a polarizer into the mix which functioned as a neutral density filter since there was little polarized light shooting into the sun. I chose f/16 so as to get maximum depth of field.

To the left is one of the images that I started out with, before any processing.

I had purposely exposed to the right so as to make sure and not lose any shadow detail in any part of the image. Some people recommend underexposing sunset shots to get those vibrant colors, but I disagree. That’s fine if you only want silhouettes, but if you want to be able to see the foreground, you really must make the exposure as bright as possible. Remember, you can always darken a bright image (if it’s not blown out), but brightening a dark image will end up with a noisy turd. You can see from the histogram above that there is a tiny bit of the image that is blown out (it was a very small part of the sky) and most of the tones in the image are in the middle to high end. I shot in RAW (as I always do), planning on bringing the exposure down later. For me, RAW is always the way to go – not because I can “fix my screw ups” later – but because I can expose the image in such a way that I maximize the signal to noise ratio and can get great colors and skies. Ken Rockwell can go and tell me all day why I should be shooting JPG, but I understand the limitations of both and still pick RAW every day of the week. I’m glad it works for him, but RAW fits my workflow far better.

To the right is the image I ended up with after some Lightroom tweaks. Aside from some minor cropping and rotating (the horizon wasn’t level, despite my best efforts on site), I added a 1 stop software GND, increased vibrance and clarity, and added a small vignette. That’s about all.

Let me know what you think!