The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
The night of March 23rd produced one of the largest aurora storms in over 5 years. We had clear skies and warm weather in Marquette, Michigan so I headed out to capture the lights. This is a 15 image panorama taken at Blackrocks, a natural rock formation famous as a destination in Marquette and also the namesake of a local beer that has become quite popular. The photo was taken during twilight and you can see some fading sun the mid lower left. The moon and Jupiter were also in the sky that night and present on the left of the image.
Specific Feedback
I am new to panoramas. I have never worked much with photoshop and so the relatively new to me discovery of a panorama stitch feature in lightroom has made them more appealing to me. There is some warping of the horizon that i have corrected the best i could without making it worse in other locations. Since the aurora tend to be a moving target there is some blurring in the aurora itself. I masked the ground and the sky and edited them separately. The edge of the snow covered rocks looks too sharp and i tried to soften that somewhat. Since i am new to panoramas, are there any standards for the sizing? I put this one together and cropped the best that i could.
Technical Details
15 photos. all shot at 20mm f2.8 4.0sec and with an ISO of 2000. Stitched and edited in Lightroom.
Wonderful!! An amazing sight with a very interesting setting. The stars, noise and sky quality look very good.
Without bringing it into PS, it looks like the horizon warps up near the region of the fading daylight. Should be warp-able.
I’m wondering why 15 for this aspect ratio? Even if the camera was in portrait orientation, I’d guess maybe 6 would give the 50% overlap usually needed. To deal with parallax distortion, find the “entrance pupil” (web search) of the lens and put it over the rotation axis. To deal with keystoning distortion, aim the lens level and crop top or bottom as needed. Tripod level and camera level. That will give a perfect pano.
I don’t have enough panorama experience to offer input on that subject. Lovely image. The moon, Jupiter, and fading light are all nice details. Amazing that the aurora is visible in the lower 48.
Thanks Diane. Exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for. I just shot photos until I got all of what I wanted in the frames. I did an upper and lower row of images in landscape mode. I will look into your suggestions.
Now that I look at your picture I realize that you must have shot two rows, and that is fine. And it looks like they assembled very well. It was the odd number of 15 frames that confused me. As long as the frames assemble, there is no problem (as far as I know) with the number of them. And the camera orientation isn’t important as long as you cover the subject.
Cameron, the mix of Aurora, moon and Jupiter make a colorful and interesting sky. I also see the Pleides. Having enough light to see the ice covered rocks adds good context.
