Top of the World

It was another epic sunset tonight, and Maclin and I went out to capture it from his ROV (remotely operated vehicle.) AKA his DJI Phantom. Unfortunately, we missed the best part of sunset by just a few minutes, and got the tail end of the sun going down. Not that bad, but could be better.

But we pressed on! Sun or no sun. First, we immediately went up to 400ft and took our pictures of the sun. We were going for a 360 pano, so we needed to get the sun first before it changed. After that, we did three 360 passes with a lower angle on each. A final photo was taken straight down. This time, we were sure to shoot with 50% overlap, so that in post the images would combine nicely.

The one problem I foresaw, was that the three rows of pictures had different exposure values. Panoramas don't blend well if they had different EVs with each image, so I wasn't sure how well the final was going to look.

So I devised a strategy. In Lr, I let it do all the adjustments to the photos so that they would have the same overall exposure value. Then I went in and raised the clarity and vibrance of each. This worked really well, and in PTGui the blended wonderfully!

To finish off the final image in Lr, I raised the clarity and vibrance a bit, and made the sky darker with a local elliptical adjustment.

See you tomorrow!