Panoramas | The Mansurovs

iPhone Panorama

10Jun/10

While driving through a local state park with my family, I saw this beautiful sunset and decided to take some pictures of it with my iPhone (I know, I left the real camera at home). I took a few shots and then realized that the scene did not quite fit the frame, so I put the phone in vertical position and took a few vertical shots using the same technique I describe in my “Panoramic Photography Howto” article. The only problem was, I could not lock the exposure or change white balance on the phone… So, here is the result:

iPhone Panorama

I stitched the panorama in Adobe Photoshop CS5, then brightened up the grass a little and slightly increased contrast. I think the result is OK, although the colors are a little out of whack…still not bad for a crappy phone camera (the new iPhone 4G is supposed to have a much better 5 megapixel camera). As Chase Jarvis puts it, the best camera is the one that is with you :)

Filed Under: Digital Photography, Panoramas Tagged With: Apple iPhone, Panorama, Photoshop

Panoramic Photography Tutorial

31May/10

17 Comments

I wrote this tutorial for those who want to learn about panoramic photography and how to photograph and stitch panoramas using a point and shoot or DSLR camera. The technique consists of two parts – photographing a scene using a camera and then using special software to align and stitch those images together to form a single panoramic image. I will go over both and will show you how to create stunning panoramic images of any subject, including landscapes.

Dead Horse Point Panorama at Sunrise

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Filed Under: Digital Photography, Guides and Howtos, Panoramas, Software Tagged With: DSLR Tips for Beginners, Panorama, Photography Tips

Dead Horse Point Panorama

17Apr/10

30 Comments

Here is the promised panoramic version of the Dead Horse Point at sunrise. The full version is comprised of 8 vertical images, measuring approximately 32 megapixels with an aspect ratio of 2:1.

All 8 shots were taken in Manual mode at f/8 and 1/10th of a second, ISO 200. Whenever you shoot panoramic images, always remember to switch to full manual mode to get identical exposure. You do not want your shutter speed or your aperture to change when you move from one point to another and shooting in manual will always yield consistent results for stitching software. Do not forget to disable Auto ISO as well – you want to keep your ISO at the lowest value for the best image quality. I will explain all of the above in a detailed “howto” that I’m currently working on.

Filed Under: Digital Photography, Landscapes, Panoramas Tagged With: Canyonlands National Park, State Parks, Utah

Trip to Utah – Part 1

27Mar/10

17 Comments

I have been putting off working the Utah images for a while and I have finally decided to finish working on them this weekend. I decided to divide the photos to two parts – the first part is primarily Arches National Park and the second part is Canyonlands National Park. Although we spent about three full days in Utah, the weather did not cooperate half of the time, so we tried to shoot as much as we could while it lasted. On top of that, as I have indicated before, I lost about 8 gigs of photos from the last two days. Hope you enjoy these!

I was initially planning to go through I-70 directly to Grand Junction and stay overnight. After a rock fell on the highway and destroyed a portion of it, we detoured through highway 287. On the way to Grand Junction, we stopped at a local farm to take some pictures of the cows early in the morning:

This one looked at me, wondering what I was up to:

Next, we headed straight to Arches. The park was flooded with rain from a couple of days before, so there were plenty of interesting pools in the area:

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Filed Under: Digital Photography, Landscapes, Panoramas Tagged With: Arches National Park, National Parks, Panorama, Utah

Back from Utah

15Mar/10

10 Comments

I’m finally back from Utah after a 7 hour drive from Moab. To get home before midnight, Sergey and I left a little early and missed the last sunset. The weather sucked during the last two days (we had 3.5 days total), so we only had a day and a half of good shooting. Nevertheless, I managed to snap 25 gigs of images, but I already know that most photos are going to be deleted. This was the first time when I tried shooting HDR panoramas in three rows and processing those images is going to be a very long and painful process. We only had time to check out some good spots at Arches and Canyonlands, although we did visit a couple of good spots for photography in the area.

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Filed Under: Digital Photography, Landscapes, Panoramas Tagged With: Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Lens, Travel, Utah, Wide Angle Lens

Best of 2009 – Landscapes (Part 2)

27Jan/10

8 Comments

This is part two of the “Best of 2009 Landscapes” series. Although I’m not an expert on building panoramic shots by any means, I believe these ones came out all right from what I shot last year. One thing for sure – I need to get a good panoramic head, because I enjoyed the process of shooting, then stitching panoramas. The largest panorama I have done so far is composed of over 250 images and it was so darn big, that I had to downsize it to 25,000 pixels. Not sure if I want to do that again, since it took forever to stitch the damn thing, but I think up to fifteen vertical images on a panorama is quite workable :)

Oh by the way, all of the shots below with the exception of “Zabriskie Point” were shot hand-held.

Dune Sunset

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Filed Under: Digital Photography, Landscapes, Panoramas, Wallpapers Tagged With: Best of 2009, Landscape Photography, Panorama, Wallpapers

Death Valley – Part 1

3Dec/09

9 Comments

I won’t go too much into what Death Valley is, since you can read all about it right here. This was my first time in Death Valley and I absolutely loved it! It was only a single day trip, but definitely a full and busy one :)

I got there late at night and stayed at the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction, which is also a hotel. Man, the place was spooky!

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Filed Under: Digital Photography, Landscapes, Panoramas Tagged With: Death Valley National Park, National Parks, Panorama, Sunrise

Sand Dune Panoramas

23Nov/09

4 Comments

After many hours of stitching and tweaking panoramas, I’m finally able to post some of the best ones from the Great Sand Dunes National Park. I had to resize and cut the below images, because some of the panoramas were too long.

Once the thumbnails fully load, click on the first image and it will bring up a separate window with a full version of the panorama. Then click on the next button on the right hand side of the image to view the rest of the panoramas. The images are 1200 pixels wide and they might not fit on your monitor – in that case, you can scroll left and right using your scroll-bar on the bottom of your browser.

I captured this first panorama on a small stream that was running alongside the dunes. The stream was very shallow and I simply stood on it, capturing the stream, the dunes and the mountains in the back: