A beautiful morning at Robe Lake, Valdez, Alaska. The calm waters provided a nice reflection for double my money’s worth. This is 3 vertical photos stitched to give me a higher resolution image for printing.
Sony a6300, SE1670Z @ 20 mm, ISO-100, f/11.0, 1/160, hand held.
The way the hovers at the base of mountains is something I really like about Alaska. I think that’s the best feature of this image. I do have a question though. Doesn’t shooting an image hand held defeat the purpose of taking the 3 photo stitch? I don’t understand this strategy.
Thanks for commenting, Igor. The purpose of the stitch is to more than double the resolution of the image. I can shoot the same frame that I would get with a single 16mm shot by zooming in to 20mm and shooting vertical instead of horizontal. The stitching is seamless, so I end up with an image that is ~8700 x 6000 instead of 6000 x 4000 plus I can shoot more frames and get a high resolution panorama if I want to. This enables me to make a much larger print that retains fine detail. On occasion I will shoot multiple rows of multiple overlapping shots (zoomed in) to build an image that will print the size of a wall and still have minute tiny details. The other advantage is that you can get a super wide angle photo without the distortion that a single shot with a very wide angle lens will cause. Hope that helps!
Oh I understand the value of a stitch but if they’re shot hand held then you’re introducing blur. So you’re shooting multiple shots to get high resolution but shooting them hand held. You’re stitching pieces which aren’t that sharp. What was it - 1/125 second? I guess the more straightforward question is, why not use a tripod?
Hi Gary! I think you achieved a wonderful overall balance in this photo, and the colors are wonderful. The only critique I could make is that while the larger cloud and its reflection seem to do a great job of making an arrow-like formation pulling the eye in from right to left into the photo and toward the tree, the very small wispy clouds underneath it seems to do the opposite and pulls my eye right, out of the frame. Perhaps some subtle darkening would help keep the eye into the photo and heading more towards the action? It really is a beautiful image.
Thanks for the clarification Igor. To answer your question; I have rarely used a tripod since I got the Sony a6500 with 5-axis motion compensation in the body. It’s pretty impressive technology. To give you some idea, here are two photos I took just to test the compensation the day I received the camera.
This one is 1/13 sec. hand held.
Then I turned around and shot the opposite direction at 1/15, hand held. If you click twice on the image to get the largest version you’ll be able to easily read the numbers on the barge.
The other problem is that the special lighting opportunities are extremely short here in Valdez near the end of the year. The mountains are very close and the sun is very low so you get light when the sun moves between the peaks. In this case the lighting lasted about 7 minutes. After that the lake was in the shadows and the color highlights were lost. I took this 3 shot panorama (as well as a number of single shots) in less than one minute and I have a large print of it that is very sharp. I probably would have missed it if I had set up the tripod.
I had some bad experiences with visual stabilization so I always turn it off. I was shooting moving water in a river at a slow shutter speed and the rocks near the water came out noticeably blurry, thus ruining my image. However, I’ve read recently that some manufacturers advise turning it on because even on a tripod there is some shake caused by camera internals that’s particularly noticeable with a big lens. So perhaps I’ll look into it again. My logic tells me that the software will never put things back together again as well as a perfectly still capture.
Lovely, Gary. I haven’t been over to Valdez since the fly-in last May, and this is a gorgeous image.
I really like the clouds and their reflections.
I also really like that line of light color (yellow-green grasses?) on the opposite shore. It really pulls this together for me.
I understand completely what you said about handholding. I rarely use a tripod; it seems like most of the time I am standing or crouching or hanging on in a place that is not conducive to setting up a tripod. By the time I got it set up, as you said, the light would be gone or the critter would either be too far away, or too close!! I have tried harder to use my tripod, but it has really impacted my ability to actually get a picture.
Are you ready for winter???
Thanks, Genny! Somehow it seems I’m never fully ready for winter. I still have a few projects to complete but the good news is that the warm weather has held out long enough that I’m almost done:-)
