DoctorChas Loc: County Durham, UK

Last night my local camera club had a trip out to one of our local landmarks, Castle Eden. Whilst wandering around, I decided to go out on the field in front of the castle and, on a whim, decided to try and shoot a 360° HDR panorama. It took about five minutes of wrestling to get the camera to track around approximately level (note to self—scrape the pennies together to get a decent pano head) and a further three minutes to shoot.

I ended up shooting 96 frames and spent nearly five hours in post to end up with what you see below. I'm sanguine enough to know when I've shot good stuff (and get equally annoyed with myself for making a pig's ear) but I have to admit I was blown away when I saw this emerge from my panorama app. I've had to scale it down somewhat to fit into the download limits here but even so, it's still IMHO a real corker.

Enjoy, and comment as you see fit.

=:~)

Castle Eden

Wanda Krack Loc: Tennessee, USA

I agree with you........good exposure, and an awesome 360!

docrob Loc: Durango, Colorado

Look at the Acratech Pano heads

Merlin1300 Loc: New England, But Now & Forever SoTX

Doc: A bit pricy - - $380 at B&H - - then again - I guess when you're taking a set of 32, 3-shot HDRs - - doing that just a couple of times with a better Pano head may produce time savings during the shoot and in post?
-
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=826076&Q=&is=REG&A=details

Wizz Loc: Maryland, USA

A real corker indeed! Your hard work sure paid off,excellent work! Got to view in download

DoctorChas Loc: County Durham, UK

And it's over £300 over here. It's certainly a very piece of kit–it just might have to go on the list :D

It wouldn't save any time in post: it took about five minutes to tweak up a preset with a sample 3-shot and then the rest of the time is really donkey work, feeding in each 3-shot one after the other and letting the computer chew through the math. The hard part was setting the shot up in the first place and the real trick was finding a place where the sun was masked behind a clump of trees so that I didn't blow out the sky when I traversed around to that part of the scene. For something that was shot on a whim and a bit of an experiment, I have to say that I'm dead chuffed with the result. I'm delighted that you folks like shot too :D

=:~)

Merlin1300 Loc: New England, But Now & Forever SoTX

Dude !! If your donkey ever writes a book on how it's done - let me know !! :-)

oldmalky Loc: West Midlands,England.

I tried download as well and was well impressed.
:thumbup: :thumbup:

angler Loc: StHelens England

Great stuff,i'm not a lover of HDR but this is supurb and the pano is something i want to try in the near future.

glojo Loc: South Devon, England

Now tell us what you really think of it

:twisted: :-D :-D

Apologies for my sense of humour and I am still thinking about how good that picture is..

WELL DONE

Are you going to enter it in any competitions and if so I would love to hear how you get on.

My thoughts are that if this picture does not win, then what ever beats it must be something unbelievably good!

Mega well done

An envious John
from Sunny Torquay

DoctorChas Loc: County Durham, UK

To be quite honest, I wouldn't have the faintest idea where to enter this :D

=:~)