PAD 104 - Totem

[Mike Farley]

Day 104 and the inspiration for this shot came from seeing David Hockney's exhibition of woodland paintings at the Royal Academy last year. There was one broken tree trunk that he called a totem and painted a number of times, so I was pleased to find something similar in the local woods. The problem was that none of my shots worked. It is quite tall and requires a wide angle lens, the consequent depth of field meaning that the trunk merged with the trees behind.

Then, while shooting "Elephant" yesterday, I had a "lightbulb" moment. I could use a moderate telephoto lens set to a wide aperture to reduce depth of field, make multiple images and then stitch them together as a panorama. Yesterday's attempt did not quite work out, although this ended up working in my favour as well as proving the concept. When I went back today, the tree was being picked out by sunlight, which also helped provide separation from the trees in the background.

The final image consists of 22 images, all shot at the identical camera setting. In Lightroom, I used the synchronise settings function for Clarity, Vibrance, Tone Curve and Sharpening, and "Match Total Exposures" to get similar exposure levels across all the images. The latter did not work very well and some individual manipulation of the Raw files was required before opening the images in Photoshop converted as 16 bit. The Photoshop merge took around 30 minutes, although I think that this was partly due to having insufficient RAM. For this many 16 bit images, 8 GB is not nearly enough and with 16 GB installed I would expect it to be much quicker.

The final image is 16,032 x 5046 pixels.

Canon EOS 7D
EF 85 f/1.8 USM
1/3200 sec
f/2.2
ISO 100

[davidc]

Interesting, this sounds like something known as the Brenizer method and can be used to simulate large format film results. It's on my list to do when I find a suitable scene.

Looking at it on my phone I'm surprised the bokeh isn't softer and more pronounced at f2.2? I'll have a look on a monitor tomorrow.

Also, have you got any shots that would add width to the image, or tried a wider crop? If you have the extra shots I'd be interested to see the impact it would have on the picture.

[Mike Farley]

I have been aware of the Brenizer method for some time, I just had not put two and two together until yesterday.

http://blog.buiphotos.com/2009/07/the-b ... irections/

I do not have any other shots besides the ones I used, as I was after a result that was tall and thin. It would not add any additional interest to the image.

[Mike Farley]

Looking at it on my phone I'm surprised the bokeh isn't softer and more pronounced at f2.2? I'll have a look on a monitor tomorrow.

Imagine what it was like when I tried a shorter focal length previously.

[davidc]

It's better at work, a larger monitor helps.

[Mike Farley]

The lens I used is supposed to have good bokeh, but it does have a weakness in that it is suffers extensively from purple and green fringing, which I found difficult to remove from the Raw files. If you look, there is a purple bloom about a third of the way down and this might have contributed to what you saw. I shot the same scene again earlier today with better optics and whilst there was still some purple fringing with some of the lenses I tried, it was not nearly as bad and was much easier to deal with in LR.