Practicing for the Big City

Canon Hill, Mary Baldwin College, Staunton, VA.

In case you haven't noticed by now, I like to take pictures. Some are good and some are really bad, but they are all fun. I've been spending time over recent months thinking about what pictures I want to take in London. I'm pretty sure that a few panoramas will be required to get the majesty of the city.


Because the way our eyes move back and forth to take in a scene well beyond what is normally captured in a photograph, we are often disappointed with the difference between what we saw when making the picture and what we see in the image we have. One way to lessen this disappointment is to make a panorama.

Most smart phones and even some fancier cameras these days will make a panorama by allowing you to move the camera as it takes a series of photos that are stitched together in-camera to produce a respectable panorama.  If you are interested in making a more complicated shot or a higher resolution image, more work is required.

As a first step in make a panorama in pieces, you probably (but not always) need a tripod. This lets you hold things still and collect photos that will join together easily. The photo above is one done from a tripod and shows almost a 180 degree view of Staunton from the top of Canon Hill. about 5 or 6 individual photos and some time with some free software (hugin) and you've got a nice picture.

But the thin that makes a city skyline dramatic is the light. Sunset, sunrise, dramatic clouds (oh yeah, we'll have clouds). Often the brightness of the scene varies so much that you simply cannot capture the look and feel of he scene in a photo because the camera always has less dynamic range than your eyes or the scene you are trying to capture.

To solve this we turn to High Dynamics Range (HDR) techniques. Here, you take multiple pictures, each exposed to capture a different part of the image (sky/clouds, ground, trees buildings, etc.). Then using software (or your camera) to put these together to make a one image with the full dynamics range compressed to fit, you can really see what it looked like. Doing this for several photos side by side and stitching them together gets you an HDR panorama.

As a test I saw the sunset at Thomas Harrison Middle School in Harrisonburg. I propped my camera agains the side mirror of my car to steady it, and took a series of 15 pictures - 5 angles and 3 at each angle to capture the full range of brightness. Once each HDR image is assembled (I use HDR Efx Pro), you can assemble the panorama. This give the following picture...

Looking west from the parking lot at Harrison Middle Schoole in Harrisonburg, VA.

This gives a picture that captures the full range from the ground in front of me to the sun in the west. I know I made some mistakes in making this image, but I'm pretty sure I know how to correct them. I'm slowly getting ready to take on London and make some images that really capture what its like to stand by the Thames and look at this grand city.