Failures Can Be Cool

The picture tonight didn't end up working. I shot in the wrong orientation, so the program couldn't blend them all together into one image. But never fear, I took what was a complete disaster and made it into something I think is pretty cool!

The photos I had were a 360 panoramic, and the ones I used were looking almost straight up at the trees with a fisheye. I took these and put them into PTGui. I had to make some new control points to get everything aligned right, but eventually it worked out and blended pretty well.

I shot at 45s, f2.8 and ISO400. It was pretty dark out, so I was trying to get some light into the camera.

In the preview editor, I changed the display mode (?) to stereographic, and then messed with the settings to get a incredibly distorted world. It was pretty much just by chance that I got it to work, but it turned out really cool! I'm to go back in and play with it a little more I think, just to see what else I can come up with.

In Lr, I converted it to b/w to hide the noise, then upped the clarity, shadows and highlights a lot to give the image more punch. I also used the stamp tool in Ps to rebuild the center of the image, which was empty because there was no picture for that part of the image. I usually work with a fairly hard brush when I need to replicate textures and such. Using a soft brush with make it look blurred and just weird.