While traveling for a shoot in South Florida I had a chance to revisit shooting the downtown Miami skyline from Watson Island. After every shoot I learn something new and in this case it was that if I turned the camera in the portrait orientation instead of the landscape orientation for a panorama, I would actually get more resolution out of the photo. Naturally when you stitch photos together you will either have to crop the output or fill in the missing areas by cloning. By turning the camera in the portrait orientation, sideways, you give yourself much more area to crop or zoom into your subject.
I haven’t seen anything more than 21 or so Megapixels so I decided that I was going to create the highest resolution panorama of the downtown Miami skyline.
Please do not reproduce this image, especially for commercial use, without my permission.
The above image preview is scaled to about 7% of the original file. Too see the full resolution 74.1 Megapixel image click the above image. Be sure to zoom, most likely your browser will massively scale down the image. Warning, the jpeg alone is 45.4MB!
Keep in mind that I was across the bay and when you zoom in, you can read the interstate signs and the lettering on buildings. That’s how much detail is in the image!
What did it take to create this image?
I took a total of 98 images, I would have taken 99 but my battery died on the very last frame. I had initially planned for 10 exposure bracketed sets of 9 images each.
This actually took me a few tries, since someone decided that it would be a great idea to stand in front of my camera and fish. I ended up spending 4 hours to complete all the images I needed, I had a few people walking on the boardwalk causing vibrations and a few boats passed by.
I captured the images in the Raw format then converted them into TIFFs. Afterwards I blended the exposures of each set of the 10 sets. This gave me 1 image per set that compressed the dynamic range of the scene.
When all the blending was complete, I used Photoshop CS5 to create a panorama of the 10 images that were produced. It actually took 12GB of RAM to stitch the panorama together! I then cloned in any missing parts of the water and sky, finally I tweaked the contrast and saturation to my liking.
When everything was finished the resulting TIFF was 536MB and the JPG 45.4 MB!
Some tech specs for the panorama:
Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II AF-S Nikkor Zoom Lens (That name is long.) @ 130mm/f8
Exposures ranging from 1/3 of a second to 30 seconds.
Tripod
Remote Release
Comments (3)
That is an awesome capture Robert. I know a lot of work went into assembling it. Well worth it. Good job!
Thanks Denis. It did take a lot of work but I definitely think it paid off.
Very nice panorama, its not often you see such good quality, especially at night.