Panoramas

Recently we went to  Western Wyoming for my nephew's graduation. We took this opportunity to also do a bit of sightseeing as well. On the way out we went through the Snowy Mountain area of the Medicine Bow Mountains and on the way home we went through Grand Tetons National Park, Yellowstone National Park and other parks.

The land is just beautiful and vast. It is just too much for a regular photograph, it needs panoramas to do it justice. To try to capture the vast beauty I took a series of photographs that I was able to stitch together with my software to form panoramas. I use several programs depending on what I am doing. I tend to use Adobe Photoshop Elements and the second most is Adobe Lightroom. I have found that these programs while similar do things differently so I use the one that will do what I want the easiest.

The downside to these stitched together panoramas can be very large file size. Sometimes the camera will see colors a bit differently in each image so you sometimes it is very noticeable where the different images were stitched together. This means that you either have to do a lot of work to correct this in the merged image of before you merge.

Here are some of the panorama that I took in Wyoming. All of these were taken with my 18-135mm lens because I have a polarizing filter for it.

This one is was take in the Snowy Mountain area of Medicine Bow it is comprised of 9 images. The settings were 400iso, f/8, 1/800sec

The next one was taken in Grand Tetons National Park, Wyoming it is comprised of 5 images. It was hazy that day so the mountains are not sharp and crisp. The settings were 400iso, f/4.5, 1/4000sec

Panorama can be more than grand vistas such as mountains but also things like lakes, ponds even waterfalls. They can be horizontal or vertical. Both of these were taken at Yellowstone. The first one is one of the prismatic hot springs in the park this picture is comprised of 4 images. This is not the Grand Prismatic Spring but a small one that was near by.  The settings were 400iso, f/11, 1/200sec. Yes, the colors were this vibrant.

The next picture is a vertical picture of Kepler Cascade and is comprised of 4 images. The settings were 400iso, f/11, 1/800sec. I did take more photos to try to merge for this waterfall but they didn't line up nicely so I decided not to use them in the panorama.

Merged Panoramas are a lot of fun and a great way to get the pictures that are too large for a single shot with your camera. Sometimes though the camera will see each photo with a slightly different color. I had this happen. I was using a 70-200mm lens that I was renting and did not have a polarizing filter for it, while this can also happen with a polarizing filter. The setting were 400iso, f/11, 1/400sec. This was taken just outside Laramie, WY. It is comprised of 10 images and it needs a lot of work on blending the colors before I would be able to use for anything.