Timepiece Ticks

A Happy New Year to all!  I trust everybody partied hearty enough AND got home safe afterwards.  Personally, I was in bed by 11:30 and asleep by 11:35.  ‘Gettin’ old I guess.

I’ve been hard @ work since the “big night” on a new project; which, given the title of this li’l blast, should come as no surprise.  :O)

I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve gotten into HDR imaging and found I like it, a LOT!  And I’ve also mentioned in the past that we live on the Potomac River.  About 5 min. drive from my house there’s a spot that overlooks the river and one can see the Rt 301 bridge from there.  Just a bit downriver from my vantage point is an island, which is the point of 1st landfall for the explorers when they 1st started nosin’ around in these parts.

And in between there’s a LOT o’ river!

I’d thought before of doing a panorama of all that; and for some reason, over the holidays, it occurred to me to combine techniques and make the pano in HDR.  I was “convinced” by the DETAIL I was getting in the pieces I’d done already.  And if that carries through in this proposed pano, I’ll have one MONSTER picture on my hands.

I did one from our back deck back in the fall and was MOST pleased with it.  But It wasn’t ’til around Xmas that I thought of doing in on such a grand scale.  This rascal will be 28 images long!  I haven’t done the math yet; it won’t be a full 28 with the overlaps factored in; but printed at 16″ tall it’s a fair guess that it’ll run 6′ long!   Did I say MONSTER?

I started shooting on it New Year’s Day, but I just wasn’t happy with the results.  The pano software cut off a couple frames, or I blew a frame, or… You name it, it went wrong.  So I reshot.  And reshot again.  ‘Different focal lengths, a BIG bunch blown ’cause I missed a setting… you get the idea.

But this morning I finished cleaning up (what’s 3 x 28?) all the jpg’s and ran the HDR software to combine ‘em.  ‘Saved ‘em all as 16 bit TIFF’s and here we are.  I’m on break!

Next step will be to re-save ‘em all, in a separate folder, as JPG’s, so it won’t take the pano software 3 days to process the thing.  And don’t laugh, 28 16 bit TIFFs would take some processing!  And, once it’s processed, the final step will be to contact my lab and see what it costs to print Monsters.  By then I’ll have the final measurements.  I’m fully prepared to find out that I can’t afford my own art.  :O)

And I’m also prepared to find that it won’t work.  At all.  There are necessarily a few seconds between “sets”, and with the wind on the water, there’ll be changes in each shot that may not work together.  If that happens, I’ll just have to pick a dead glassy calm day (rare ’round here) AND the light I need.  To get ‘em BOTH will require some doing!  I’ve got my fingers crossed!

This all started when I showed a fistful at the community clubhouse.  I met a gent there who gave me permission to shoot Bald Eagles from his yard right on the river.  ‘Haven’t gotten any Eagles yet, but…

I’ll sign off now and keep y’all posted on the Great Pano Project as it (‘scuse the term) develops.

Oh, yeah; here’s the shot I was so pleased with…

Cheers!

RD