I’d like to highlight one photo from my recently published Petroglyphs and Prairie blog post and photo gallery. It’s my large panorama of the prairie at the Jeffers Petroglyphs.
This is but a very small version that will fit on this page. Click on the picture and you should be able to see a slightly larger version in my galleries. For an even better view, I have posted a larger version that will allow you to scroll from side to side on my website at http://www.restenergy.net/prairiepanorama.html
Geek Warning: What follows are details concerning the panorama’s size and creation.
This HDR panorama was created from 16 sets of bracketed exposures (-2/0/+2 EV). The photographs were taken in a portrait orientation to maximize the vertical size of the view with a zoom lens set at an 18mm focal length. These photographs span between 270 and 300 degrees around the scene. Each set of exposures were combined into an HDR image and tone mapped with Photomatix Pro, using identical settings for each set. The settings were determined by processing a test image and then saved for application in a batch process. The 16 HDR photographs were then stitched together in Photoshop CS4 using the Photomerge feature. The layers created were merged and the resulting image was cropped to make the final image rectangular. Because the Photomatix output was a bit flat, curves were applied to adjust overall contrast, and also to provide separate adjustments on the ground and sky areas. Slight vibrancy adjustments were made to make the color “pop.” The resulting image size is 19455 by 4017 pixels and becomes a 979.2 megabyte Photoshop file! This would print as an approximately 64.9 x 13.4 inch (164.7 x 34.0 cm) image at 300 pixels per inch. The scrolling version linked above is substantially reduced, but remains a 1.3 MB .jpg file.
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