Panorama of Rangitoto Island at Dawn.

 

I've wanted to put together a wide panorama of Rangitoto Island at dawn for a while now but being winter I've struggled to drag my weary but out of bed early enough. That is until a few weeks ago when I managed to drive over to Takapuna early one Sunday morning.

I made a few errors when shooting, possibly due to a lack of caffeine, which made the resulting 6 image panorama (3 for the top, 3 for the bottom) difficult to put together.

Firstly I used a polariser to slow down my shutter speed, as I well should have remembered at the time this caused the sky in the 3 shots to become uneven, luckily these was pretty easy to remedy later. 

I also bracketed exposures. When the slowest shutter speed is 30 seconds and you're taking 3 sets of 6 images the time between the first and last shots is nearly 5 minutes. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but at this time of day the light colour and intensity was changing so quickly that the first and last images were completely different exposures  and colour. This wasn't to much of a problem for the top half of the image but the rocks and water in the foreground were difficult. I managed to cobble together a blend of several different exposures before manually stitching it together with the top half but no matter how much I tried I was unable to cheat physics and it just doesn't look quite right.

Finally, I'm not entirely happy with the rocks in the foreground. While they do add a bit of interest and help anchor the image they don't really sit in harmony with the top half, I need to find a better spot next time.

Sydney Skyline panorama at dusk

 

I've been to a lot of cities in the world (one big gap being the cities of the US) and I've always thought that Sydney, one of the first places I visited outside of New Zealand, was one of the best looking cities on the planet. My return visit the other week only helped to affirm that belief. Sure, at ground level the great cities of Europe are hard to beat but from a distance, with that harbour, that bridge, that skyline and that Opera house, Sydney is hard to beat. 

Our trip the other week was to visit old friends but I did manage to steal away for a few hours to Milsons point to capture the skyline at dusk.

It's been a while since I spent a good amount of time doing a manual blend of an image, but after giving this 3 shot panorama a quick and rough edit I decided that it was probably worth spending a bit more time with it. So I went back to the original images and manually blended the highlights from the under exposed images with the over exposed images which brought back a lot of detail. The middle image of the brackets were then used to remove light trails from boats on the harbour (one decided to streak right past the Opera house at the wrong moment). This took me quite a lot of time, however the process was sped along by my recent purchase of a Wacom graphics tablet. I think the end result was worth the time I spent on it.

The image presented here is a little small to show all the detail in the image so it's totally worth checking out in higher resolution on either 500px or Flickr, just click whichever one you prefer.