Looking across the water from Canada Place to the North Shore mountains and Stanley Park, with the new Vancouver seaplane terminal in the foreground.
It's nice to see the new terminal is starting to get some use!
This is a 184 megapixel HDR panorama consisting of 12 different shots at 105mm, each with 7 different exposures, for a total of 84 pictures. My computer is really have to work to process the larger files from my new camera -- just converting from RAW to JPEG took about 30 minutes, with the best part of a further hour to perform the stitching.
The full resolution, zoomable panorama can be interactively explored on Gigapan -- use the mouse wheel to zoom in and drag around, or click on the snapshots below the main image:
I'm a British software developer and photographer living in Vancouver, BC. I mainly photograph landscapes, cityscapes, night scenes, and water.
If you're interested in any...
Whew! All that effort. My brain spins. The elevator is really that purple? The reflections as lines of light appear consistent throughout this shot. Nice.
@frankhymus It's lit by RGB LEDs so it changes between white, blue, purple and green (at least). Taking the 21 shots that make up the elevator section when it was at the same point in the colour cycle was a little tedious! Fortunately it doesn't change too quickly, so I could get them in two batches.
The gigapan is amazing - so is the shot :) I've not done this before and I'm curious about it. I'm assuming you're using some bracketing function within your camera to get the 7 exposures? When I do HDR I have to manually adjust the exposure (-2,-1,0,+1,+2), snap the shots and then merge later (camera only supports 3 brackets). I can't see doing 84 shots this way as margin for error would be high.
Once you have all of the shots converted to jpeg, do you then load them into a program and process? I'm going to read the tutorials @ Gigapan as well.
@brianl, Alexis shoots Canon, which give their users up to 9 brackets. Nikon hoses us with 3 unless you go with the D3/D4. I think it's an unnecessary hobbling by Nikon.
Alexis, a true dedication to a shot, well done. Some day all photography will be done in this detail.
@brianl@cameronknowlton For long enough Canon only gave three-exposure bracketing as well. The new camera lets you choose between 2, 3, 5 or 7 shot bracketing. It does make it significantly easier!
Once the shots were converted to JPEG (a process I went through twice as I wasn't happy with the white balance I'd picked the first time, it was too blue), I loaded them into Hugin, a free open-source stitching program capable of coping with huge panoramas.
@frankhymus In terms of the elevator or the entire shot? The elevator was largely as you see in terms of saturation, LEDs will produce very strong colours. I think in the mode they're in they're just putting out blue and red light, so that's all that is lighting up the shaft.
Because it's HDR'd the the colours are stronger than with a single shot, as you would overexpose them (as well as various other elements of the photo, such as the burn-your-retinas-out Chevron sign) -- but your eyes have enough dynamic range to cope with that.
The main difference between the shot and how it was seen with the naked eye (other than the resolution) is the shadow detail in the park in the middle distance. By using a long exposure I was able to bring out more detail in that than was visible to the eye, which was adjusted to the local, brighter ambient light.
The thing that really stands out when you stand on that spot is just how incredibly yellow the lights on the pontoons are. I'm not sure what technology they are, but they are far more yellow than the typical low-pressure sodium street lights. I assume they must be LED technology as well, although I've no idea why they chose that colour (although it's probably better than the typical blue-white of far too many general-purpose LED lights).
@cameronknowlton That could well be it -- although they didn't bother with that on the old terminal! Makes sense though!
Hugin is a fair bit more advanced the Autopano Giga, but is also a fair bit more complicated to use. It's also slower at stitching the final panorama, although I believe the warping operations are more accurate and retain more sharpness. In terms of flexibility of how you want the final panorama to look, Hugin is definitely the best choice.
Hugin is fully automatic for determining control points, blending, etc., so you can use it in one-click mode like Autopano (it has been for a few years, so I'm not sure if you used an old version). The main benefit Autopano Giga had (other than ease of use) was a slightly better control point generator (the bit which matches up features in images), but the exact same algorithm is now included in Hugin as well (autopano-sift).
Autopano Giga is a great choice if you want simplicity -- it will produce a perfectly acceptable panorama almost every time with a single click -- but Hugin will generally produce higher quality results, if you can put up with its learning curve (although these days, you can get pretty fine results just by hitting 'Load Images', 'Align', 'Create Panorama' in it). And when you want to tweak the parameters, or when you have a tricky stitch that just won't go together on automatic settings, Hugin is the only option.
@abirkill Hi Alex. Thanks for all the information about how to do all this, It is much appreciated, and this is what I like about this site, the sharing of information.
Being a newbie, I am still getting the fundamentals straight, and then i will come back to your advanced view of the world. Cheers.
Once you have all of the shots converted to jpeg, do you then load them into a program and process? I'm going to read the tutorials @ Gigapan as well.
Alexis, a true dedication to a shot, well done. Some day all photography will be done in this detail.
Once the shots were converted to JPEG (a process I went through twice as I wasn't happy with the white balance I'd picked the first time, it was too blue), I loaded them into Hugin, a free open-source stitching program capable of coping with huge panoramas.
@frankhymus In terms of the elevator or the entire shot? The elevator was largely as you see in terms of saturation, LEDs will produce very strong colours. I think in the mode they're in they're just putting out blue and red light, so that's all that is lighting up the shaft.
Because it's HDR'd the the colours are stronger than with a single shot, as you would overexpose them (as well as various other elements of the photo, such as the burn-your-retinas-out Chevron sign) -- but your eyes have enough dynamic range to cope with that.
The main difference between the shot and how it was seen with the naked eye (other than the resolution) is the shadow detail in the park in the middle distance. By using a long exposure I was able to bring out more detail in that than was visible to the eye, which was adjusted to the local, brighter ambient light.
The thing that really stands out when you stand on that spot is just how incredibly yellow the lights on the pontoons are. I'm not sure what technology they are, but they are far more yellow than the typical low-pressure sodium street lights. I assume they must be LED technology as well, although I've no idea why they chose that colour (although it's probably better than the typical blue-white of far too many general-purpose LED lights).
Alexis, check out Autopano Giga (the Giga part's important), WAY easier than manually stitching in Hugin. All the more admirable an effort, well done.
Hugin is a fair bit more advanced the Autopano Giga, but is also a fair bit more complicated to use. It's also slower at stitching the final panorama, although I believe the warping operations are more accurate and retain more sharpness. In terms of flexibility of how you want the final panorama to look, Hugin is definitely the best choice.
Hugin is fully automatic for determining control points, blending, etc., so you can use it in one-click mode like Autopano (it has been for a few years, so I'm not sure if you used an old version). The main benefit Autopano Giga had (other than ease of use) was a slightly better control point generator (the bit which matches up features in images), but the exact same algorithm is now included in Hugin as well (autopano-sift).
Autopano Giga is a great choice if you want simplicity -- it will produce a perfectly acceptable panorama almost every time with a single click -- but Hugin will generally produce higher quality results, if you can put up with its learning curve (although these days, you can get pretty fine results just by hitting 'Load Images', 'Align', 'Create Panorama' in it). And when you want to tweak the parameters, or when you have a tricky stitch that just won't go together on automatic settings, Hugin is the only option.
Being a newbie, I am still getting the fundamentals straight, and then i will come back to your advanced view of the world. Cheers.