We fired the thing up tonight, and then sent it up 100ft in the air above his house at sunset. It has a GPS system that keeps it in a fixed location overhead, so I simply hovered while I took pictures. There's a screen on the controller, so I could just look at that for framing. I ended up doing a 360 panoramic by rotating the copter around while taking photos. Pretty much the same as with a tripod. Only 100ft in the air above you.
The one thing I had to keep mind of, was the exposure. There were no manual settings, so I had to trick the thing into exposing for the shadows and highlights equally. Part of it was lucky, semi even lighting, and part was having 50% land and 50% sky in the frame. The camera averages out the two so that both are close to proper exposure. The sky will be over and the ground under, but they are both very recoverable later in editing.
Speaking of editing, I did all my work while the photos were not merged yet. The camera shoots in RAW, so I had a lot of latitude to do tweaks. I basically did a Lr HDR edit, so I lowered the highlights and raised the shadows. The tonal range was flattened down to fit what the computer and camera can display. I've explained this a few times before I think. I also increased the sat and clarity a bit to make everything pop.
It took PTGui a few tries to get a good stitching, mostly because I didn't provided enough overlap between photos. Generally, you need 50% to be safe. Especially in changing light and when flying an helicopter.
Once I had my pano, I did a little local adjustment over the sun and sky to make it more intense. I upped the clarity and saturation to accomplish this.
Finally, I added a little vignette. For exporting big panos like this, I limit the file size and dimensions so that it can actually upload and download to people's devices. a 125 megapixel photo won't load very well on a iPhone on 3G....
See you tomorrow!
No comments:
Post a Comment