More STITCHING, guess I am stuck on that right now

I was having lunch outside the building where I work and watched some very beautiful clouds as they constantly were changing their form. At one point I could see three dogs of various types in one of the large clouds. SO I decided to go take a few pictures of the formation as it was as lunch time was nearing an end. I had my telephoto lens attached so the whole landscape could not fit into one frame but I wanted to try some stitching with them anyway so I shot several sequences of images to see what I could get. The best one resulted in a file that was 611 megapixels. If that were just one image in Raw it would have meant that I had at least a 3 or 4 hundred meg sensor in the camera. It took a long time to process as well but it was fun. I had detail in that panorama that I could never have captured had I shot it with a smaller lens as only one image. Of course after I reduced the size to be small enough for the blog one would never be able to tell the detail of which I am speaking. Here they are:

Stitching in the Park

I have done multiple image stitching with images several times now and found it to be very fun. However I always have thought of it as an open view of the world type image that you would have to have to make it look OK. While in Oregon however I decided to take an area where there wasn't a view of lots of mountains or wide open area and try out the process with a rather enclosed , limited view area of Tryon Park in Lake Oswego, OR. 

So from one of the observation decks in the park I just started shooting a series of images carefully watching the trees on the right side of the image and shooting them again with them on the left side of the next image as I shot going from my left to my right. It worked rather well except for the very first image that had the trunk of the tree taking up the entire length of the right side of the image and apparently Photoshop couldn't recognize it in the next image. The rest of the images made for a great panorama however and the result is shown in the very last image. The second to the last picture was with just the last three images of the sequence stitched together into one. 

Have a look and then try to do some of your own. Just take a series of portrait style images and make sure you overlap each image with something from the previous image to give Photoshop reference points.

This is the image that is missing from the bottom left side of the final panorama.

Lazy summer Days

I had an hour to wait until an expected client arrived at the park for pictures. I always try to go real early to appointments since I do not know what delays might occur on the way such as road detours, clogged freeways and flat tires. (I hate those flat tires,especially changing the ones on the same side as the traffic.)

Anyway so I laid down under a tree and decided to close my eyes and get a little rest. Except I didn't close my eyes before I ended up laying all the way down and had the trees above me as in these pictures. I got back up quickly , grabbed my camera, changes the lens and started shooting. It helps me to look at them now to realize how relaxing the next few minutes were for me and then to close my eyes if only for a few seconds and imagine that I were there again just lazing around on a long summer day in a park looking up at the tops of the trees providing me with shade from the hot summer sun.

July Fireworks

I decided to put a few of my images from our little towns fireworks show in July onto my blog. They are set off in a park just 100 yards from my home so it isn't hard to get to the park and get some good seats just 35 or so yards from where the fireworks are actually ignited. So these shots are a litle different from most firework shots in that you can see the smoke from their ignition. In one you can actually see the complete thing from the ground to the explosion. I didn't really get to see all of the show because the mirror kept getting in the road of my view for some reason. (Duh!!) Actually this is a situation where I keep both eyes open while shooting so as not to be surprised by something coming at me at an angle lower than the viewfinder so I still see most of the show.