Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Sydney Panoramic Shoot # 2


After a successful first trip to Sydney in the middle of April I decided I should return and attempt to shoot a high resolution pano from the Sydney Harbour Bridge Pylon Lookout. I was hoping to get a dusk shot on the shortest day of the year but as it turns out that deep blue night sky I love wouldn't show up until 10 minutes after the Pylon Lookout closed at 5pm.

On the last trip I met Christian - The French Photographer at the Rocks Market. He met me in the city and we headed out to Bondi Beach for a shoot. The light was not that great at that time of day but we did have a bit of fun with my Tilt/Shift lens and some HDR pano capture. So with this in mind we decided to start this trip off right - with a sunrise venture out to Bondi again.



I started off by re-shooting the exact same pano from the Lookout near Bondi Icebreakers that I had shot back in April. I think I was still half asleep when I started shooting - not that often I shoot at daybreak as I'm more of a night photography kind of guy. There was a guy with a huge 300 or 400mm Nikon telephoto standing right beside me and of course he had to keep moving and getting in the way of me while I was shooting. Not too sure at this stage if this set will even stitch thanks to him.

Luckily he left and I switched to my 15mm Fisheye lens for a little planet view of the area. This one worked out well and I tested out a number of alternate projections of it so far.

Christian was working near the surf with my 45mm TS-E lens and really getting the hang of it to blur everything in the frame but a thin line of focus. He was loving this lens so much I left it in Sydney with him as he was planning on coming to Melbourne the following week anyway.

I setup in the sand for another fisheye 360 as the sun was starting to get just about the horizon and finished off with a 2 Row x 36 Col near the edge of the surf. It is going to be one hard stitch to make work as the waves were really rolling in and about 1/3rd of the field of view is basically just that - waves! They never line up and take tons of post production edits to fix. This sort of mass movement is what makes pano photographers yearn for sweep rotation cameras such as the Seitz Roundshot units.

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