Thursday, March 17, 2011

Hillsboro Lighthouse Panorama

Click the image for a larger view.

Tonight I walked down to the beach on the south side of Hillsboro Inlet. I brought my camera and tripod so I could shoot this panorama. While I didn't use a dedicated panoramic head on my tripod, I did have my Manfrotto 503HDV head which allowed me to slide the camera back so the center of rotation was directly below the camera's entrance pupil. This point is usually just in front of the aperture diaphragm in the lens. If you don't rotate the camera around this point, you'll get parallax errors and the images will be much harder to stitch together.

This panorama is made from four 16MP images. I used Hugin to stitch the images together, then I did some minor retouching in Photoshop. The final image is more than 14,000 pixels in width.

Nikon D7000 with Nikon 35mm f/1.8 lens. Exposure: f/5.6 20sec ISO 400 (all four images)