HDR PANORAMA

I shoot a lot of pictures in the marina. The community along the north side of the marina harbor really was fashioned after one of Paolo Soleri's arcologies. As for Paolo Soleri and his politics, that is a discussion for another person's blog. I took these shots for the look of this seaside architecture.

I originally took several autobracketing sequences in each of four overlapping directions. I do my sorting and picking in Lightroom. It allows me to separate into collections the groups of images I will pick my HDR assemblies from. Initially I narrowed it down to 22 pictures in four groups. I had 6 for the left, 5 for left center, 5 for for right center, and 6 for the far right. In Lightroom I also reduce the noise where needed, and make sure I have all the white balances equal. Lightroom outputs 16 bit Tiff's as temp files until the HDR is created. It then automatically cleans those up for you.

Ideally I should have an equal number shots in each group with the EV'S spanning the same range. The shot on the right also contained a fence and walkway where I was shooting from. It didn't add anything to the picture so I didn't use the far right's group of photos.

The final panorama of the north marina harbor shown here is made from 16 shots I kept. The HDR's were first generated for 3 overlapping images (6 exposures,5 exposures,5 exposures left to right as I wrote above.) The resulting HDR's were tonemapped in Photomatix and photomerged into a panorama in Photoshop. The automation in photoshop didn't require any editing. I did adjust the levels and reduced the noise a little further to make a cleaner shot.

Though the left foreground was beginning to be shaded by the Marriott hotel and other buildings, for the most part I had good light. HDR allowed to the shaded part to be more clearly seen.

I already have a wider sequence of the panorama south of the Manhattan Beach pier which I will be working on later if this one goes well.