Scroll (a lot…)>>>>>>>>>>>>
By dirtyforker at 2010-01-05
22 shots, 50mmf8 @ 200ISO taken with a canon 350d and a sigma 18-50f2.8.
Stitched using Hugin and then processed using the Gimp.
Taken from the top of the Lupu bridge in Shanghai, the second longest arch bridge in the world.
The viewing platform is a lift to the deck and then a hike up a couple of hundred steps on one of the arches. Ticket was 38RMB (ie. not much) If you’re ever in the ‘hai and get a clear day this is a must-do.
The viewing platform at the top is rectangular and the photos were taken from the four corners so as to minimise the bridge getting in the way of the shots. Managed to cock that up though and wasn’t able to completely remove it from the final pano.
It was a pretty dull day and I didn’t have tripod so f8 was as small an aperture as I could get while still having decent shutter speed at 200iso. Even so a couple of the shots are not completely sharp and a brighter day and/or a stabilised lens could get much better results I think.
I couldn’t have used a tripod anyway as I had to lean out at the four corners of the viewing platform to minimise the bridge.
Used manual settings to keep the exposures consistent and left the lens manually focussed at infinity.
Hugin was very good at stitching the shots and blending the exposures smoothly.
There were a couple of places where I didn’t have enough overlap for the program to auto stitch, but luckily I’d left no gaps and was able to stitch those spots manually.
Tweaked the stitching a little and had to reset a lot of points to ‘vertical’ so that Hugin didn’t produce a city full of leaning towers.
Straightened the horizon using Hugin’s built in tool.
Using the Gimp…
It was very difficult to follow the horizon accurately and so the full (450MB tiff!!) pano waved up and down.
The biggest straight crop I could get still lost nearly half of each frame and even then I had to clone in a small sliver of river where I’d lifted the camera too high, and a strip of sky in the middle where I dropped the camera down to include the foreground.
Cloned out dust spots visible in the sky where I had a dirty sensor.
Changed the colour balance a little (camera settings are dull, but get the most detail).
Used the unsharp mask with large radius and zero threshold to tweak the local contrast and clear a lot of the haze.
Selected the blazing white bridge in the centre and toned down it’s brightness and contrast so it was less noticeable.
Scaled the image down for the web, and did a final bit of sharpening.
Voila.
Hope you like it.