We were out driving the other afternoon and I took Sraddha up to the Sedona Airport for the vista. I have been up here before in mornings. We couldn’t stay very long as I was double parked in handicap spot so Sraddha could view and I didn’t want to pay the parking fee cheapskate that I have become (or is it budget conscious). The light hadn’t really developed yet as it was only 3 hours until sunset, but the clouds were really interesting.
Hmm. How to photograph this?
Because we were at the airport, I couldn’t fly the quadcopter so I dug out my Olympus EM5-MKII with 12-40 lens, and shot 6 shots turning the camera to portrait mode and overlapping about 30%. What made the colors pop is that each shot was actually a 3 shot HDR. So I took a total of 18 photos. Each 3 were +2,0,-2 in exposure. I used my tripod but it wasn’t exactly level as time was of the essence.
Camera settings
focus – 22 mm (equivalent to 44mm in full frame),
F5 at around 1/2000, ISO 200.
Processing in Lightroom & Photoshop
I processed the photos in Adobe Lightroom using my usual EM1 import preset, then ran the 18 photos thru Photomatix using natural setting. Merged the resultant 6 HDR TIF files into panorama in Adobe Photoshop, then cleaned it up a bit and brought it back to Lightroom where I did some final minor adjustments in shadows and color the cropped 3:1 to get some of the foreground out. (below is unadjusted version for comparison)
While not my best work it was quick taking me only about 25 minutes from start to finish.
Un-adjusted Un-cropped Panorama
Adjusted HDR Panorama in Black & White
I made a virtual copy of the first shot in Lightroom then set it to Black and White. Sharpened it a little and adjusted blacks, whites and color. slight contrast.
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