Combined Techniques

Let's put together two photo techniques and see what happens.

The last post here was about creating a panorama. Back in August of 2012 I did a post on HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photography.

In creating a panorama two or more shots are assembled into an extra wide or panoramic image. In HDR photography two or more different exposures of the same image are put together to create an image with detail in all areas including portions of the image that would be too bright, or too dark, to include detailed information.

So now let's combine the techniques and create an HDR panorama. In this case I pointed my camera at the left end of the about to be created panorama and took five images at five different exposures. Moving to the center of the future panorama and being sure to overlap the first shot series, I took another five exposures from way too dark to way too light. Moving right I repeated the procedure for the final shot.

Now I uploaded all 15 exposures to my computer and started to work. I selected the first five images and exported them to Photomatix Pro and created an HDR composite. With the next five I repeated the process using the same settings to create the same effect and then did the same once again for the last five.

Now with three HDR images in my Lightroom organizer I selected them and selected "Merge to Panorama in Photoshop" and here is the result:

I enjoy creating HDR photos and also panoramas. I have contemplated putting the two together on several occasions but had not stopped and said OK, now is the time. Well then came four inches of rain and the creek in my back yard looked more like a river (to me) and I decided now is the time.

Still I cheated. I used the Program Mode and a five shot automatically created bracketing series in Nikon's Continuous High shooting mode, where the camera takes one exposure at the meter reading, then at one and two stops less and then one and two stops more. In Continuous High mode this takes less than a second on the Nikon D700 and was done hand held. Here, as in the processing described above, I repeated the same steps twice more and the shooting was done.

Photoshop had no trouble matching the images. Since I was standing quite close to the creek the curve is exaggerated but since there really is a curve it looks nearly the same as real life. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised by what happens even when I take shortcuts I know I would be better off not taking.

Give it a try, surprise yourself.