Weybourne Beach at Sunset

Following on from my last post I decided to revisit Weybourne and attempt to capture the beach vista looking West along the coast with the tractor and boat as a focal point. To do this was going to be tricky as the last image I took was a close up of the machines shot at about 28 mm on a full frame DSLR. This is about as wide as I can shoot with the Nikkor 24-70mm F2.8 as it vignettes a bit at 24 mm with P series ND filters attached. I wanted to keep the machinery in the same position so the only option to me and one I had been thinking about since the last visit was a multi stitch panorama. I thought about the problems I might face on the day and set about preparing a shooting plan. The actual stitch in theory seemed easy but with the machinery and lobster pot only about six feet in front of the camera and the rest of the image disappearing off into the distance, I knew things wouldn't be quite that straight forward. I don't own a panoramic head which would have allowed me to shoot around the nodal point of the lens thus eliminating much of the distortion that I knew may creep into the final stitched image. All I could do was to keep the camera as level as possible and hope that the distortion wasn't too major. The other issue I faced was trying to hold back the brightness of the sky while exposing for the foreground. A three stop ND Grad was used to do this but it meant cutting through the boat and tractor on the right hand side of the image. I figured the best way round this problem was to shoot two images of the machinery, one with a filter, one without, and simply blend them together. This worked a treat. The stitch went well in Photoshop and I was able to use the vast majority of the finished photograph which was made up of three separate images. The real beauty of producing a panorama is that I now have a large file which I can print to a really impressive size if I so wish, something that couldn't quite be achieved using an ultra wide angle lens and the same composition.

Weybourne Beach at sunset

    

Panoramas with the Fuji X100

People who've read some of my previous blog posts will know that i'm a bit of a Fuji X100 fan. I won't repeat myself on the reasons why I love this camera so much, (please check out some of my earlier entries), but I've recently discovered another function which makes me love it just a little more. I'm referring to the panorama shooting mode, which is buried away in the menu settings, and which at first I thought was a bit gimmicky. It has some major drawbacks, but used carefully, it produces some fantastic results which could easily be given to a client, included in a photographic package or sold as a fine art print...

So, the drawbacks. Firstly, It only shoots panoramas in jpeg. This isn't a massive deal, it just means that you will need to expose the image with the brightest part of the scene in mind, careful to avoid blown highlights which may be a struggle to recover in post. Secondly, the inbuilt ND filter cannot be used during this mode, which means that if the scene is very bright, no matter how hard you try, some brighter areas of the image may blow regardless of F stop, shutter speed and ISO combination. Why should this be the case, surely the shutter speed can be increased to accommodate this? Well no, there is a slight issue in doing so. If the shutter speed is above 1/200 sec, unwanted banding can sometimes be seen across the entire image. Dropping the shutter below this speed seems to rectify the problem almost entirely, so correctly exposing a bright scene with a high dynamic range whilst controlling the shutter, while tough, becomes essential. Thirdly, images sometimes struggle to stitch if there is a great deal of detail to capture, or is far away. Sticking to fairly simple scenes similar to the panorama in my previous Skegness post, can produce stunning results. It really is a case of trial and error, but stick with it and great results can be had. So get out there, set the camera to full manual mode and start snapping, you never know what you might capture.

A scene that really tested the camera. Quite dark on the right hand side of the image and brighter on the left. I exposed for the left hand side of the frame which gave me a reading of F11, 1/125 sec @ ISO 3200. Handheld 

A more evenly lit scene so easier to expose. F16, 1/125 sec @ ISO 320. Handheld