Oregon Hikers

Suggestions based on my experience taking photos over a long period of time:
Shasta--Second floor balcony of the Best Western motel in the town of Mt. Shasta
Three Sisters--View point on the highway between Bend and Sisters. This really is a primo view of all three mountains.
Jefferson--Excellent view of the east side from the top of the hill out of Warm Springs going north. The Coffin Mountain area offers nice views of the west side.
Adams--Tahk Lahk Lake is an easy drive and has an exceptional view.
Rainier--Second Burroughs. I have a panorama from there on the wall of my den.
Glacier Peak--Flower Dome in the Buck Creek Pass area offers a wonderful view but it is a pretty good pull up there. There is also a good view from Red Pass on the PCT but it is not a convenient place to go.
Baker--Park Butte just below the lookout offers a great view of the south side with an opportunity for a reflection photo. For a photo of the north side there is a good view from the Yellow Aster Lakes area.

Curious to know what equipment and software you use to produce these remarkable photos and how long does it take to do one like your photo of Mt. Hood.

oldandslow wrote: ↑

April 8th, 2020, 10:38 am

Curious to know what equipment and software you use to produce these remarkable photos and how long does it take to do one like your photo of Mt. Hood.

Kind of embarrassingly, it's nothing particularly novel except photoshop and patience. I have a Sony a7r2 (the camera is quite a few years old now, but one shot is 42 megapixels) and I use a 70-200mm lens. Zoomed in all the way to 200mm, I start somewhere near the bottom a little below where I think I want to start the panorama, then take a picture. (with whatever settings, on a tripod, triggered on a delay so there's no shaking) Then very slowly and carefully pan the camera right, so that the next shot overlaps the previous one by about 15-20%, and take another. Do this a few hundred times (the Mount Hood shot took about 30 minutes to take all of the shots I used). Then do all the basic adjustments, like remove vignette from the individual shots (I typically take them at f/11 because that is the sharpest f-stop for my lens, so vignetting isn't a huge issue but it would still be noticeable) then with all of the shots highlighted, say "Merge to Panorama in Photoshop". It'll ask you to confirm some merge settings and then you leave it alone to think for a few hours. If you did everything right, it'll pop out a beautiful merged image. (sometimes it doesn't work- there are specific things like clear sky or blurry water that tend to not merge properly) But then all you have to do is go through with your specific edits- removing the sensor dust, color and contrast adjustments- then save it.

In this case, the photos are big enough that I can't save them in any format except .psb, photoshop's dedicated "large file size document" as it is too big to save as a tiff and it somehow exceeds the maximum resolution allowed for a jpeg... which is apparently a thing...

In total, the image only takes a few hours of active work. The edits are pretty straight forward, and you can copy paste, so just edit the bright parts of the brightest individual image, copy those adjustments to the darkest image and edit the dark parts edited, copy all adjustments made to the one complete image and apply them to the whole set.

The hardest part is filling in any potential gaps you may have missed in the final panorama. Usually if I miss something I consider it unusable and have to go out again, so these two in particular I got really lucky.

When I set up for the Mount Hood shot, I didn't really have in mind that it would be as spectacular as it ended up being. I was out scoping the location for a future shoot. The moon being there was pure luck.

Do you use an indexing rotator to make all that tilt/pan easier?

Webfoot wrote: ↑

April 8th, 2020, 6:02 pm

Do you use an indexing rotator to make all that tilt/pan easier?

Edit- I was thinking a different thing. It wouldn't be a bad idea. Still I haven't yet. My tripod head has a compass on it, but I have done pretty well eyeballing it. (occasionally I'll screw up, but it's uncommon enough that I don't mind being imprecise)

Yesterday in the course of looking for something else I came across a panorama of the Three Sisters that I took about five years ago from the viewpoint I suggested.

I got one for Adams!
(the rise at 46.115178,-121.420724 was perfect)