Because I live in Valdez, Alaska (the snow capitol of the world), I probably have many more images for this category than most people
This image was taken on Thompson Pass, looking directly South across the canyon. The mid day sun was extremely bright but somewhat filtered by thin clouds and a high level haze. The scene was spectacular and I wanted to capture the sun in the scene so I knew a single shot was never going to work. I was on snowshoes and didn’t have my tripod so the only chance I had of capturing the huge dynamic range was to use the built in HDR function on my Sony a6300. You pre-set the number of stops you want to bracket then take the shot. The camera shoots 3 photos at 3 exposures, aligns them, blends them and spits out two jpegs, one at the settings you took the shot with and the other is the bracketed blended image. The really cool thing is that it can do it when you are shooting hand held! In this case, I shot two horizontal photos using this method and then stitched the blended versions to create this panorama. The bottom line is 4 photos to create this image. Although it looks like a b&w conversion it is full color. You can tell by the little hint of blue sky showing through the clouds & haze on the left side.
Gary, the drama in this view is great, especially in the large views. That’s an impressively deep valley across the foreground. The wide variety of clouds makes for a great sky. I’m also enjoying the segment of 22 degree arc around the sun (bright arc starting at the top about 1/4 of the way in from the right). Pretty cool to be able to do this hand held and then blend the two shots.
Stunning photo. Well done. FYI, I have shot quite a few handheld exposure bracketed photos with my Canon 5D IV, some up to 7 shots, and successfuly auto aligned them in Photoshop then combined them into an HDR image.
Tony; I’ve been doing that for years also and it takes plenty of time at the computer to get the alignment perfect and then do the blending. The really fun thing about the new technology is that the camera does it all for me in less than 3 seconds while I’m standing there. If it looks good I can move on. If I don’t like the blend I can change the single shot exposure and do it again. I can do 3 or 4 slightly different exposure blends in less than 30 seconds!
That’s the only down side. It uses the raw images to align and blend but the output is jpeg (because of all the processing involved) The good news is that it usually does such a good job with the blend that I’ve been very happy with the results and the jpeg noise level is very minimal. There is also another little thing it does in processing that is very impressive. When it aligns the images and finds that one element of the scene had moved between the three fast shots, it recognizes the pixels that moved and chooses to use the information from the image with the best exposure in that area of the scene and cuts it out of the other images before blending so that the blend has only the one object and its still sharp! It has its limits but does it amazingly well if the motion is not too fast. The very first time I tried the function there was a fishng boat moving slowly across the scene. I fully expected it to be ghosted or at least blurred but it was sharp!
Great looking pano and the interplay of light and shadow is outstanding, Gary. Very impressive work for hand holding. I could not have done it without a tripod.
