Foggy Autumn Panorama
Yesterday (on my day off), I had a request to shoot a photo in the library that went to my boss. Through e-mail, he asked me to plan on taking care of this request on Thursday or Friday of this week. Because of that, I took my camera and tripod with me to work this morning.
When I stepped out of my apartment and headed out, I noticed that it was not too cold, but very foggy. It wasn't all that impressive until I started walking onto campus and crossed the quad in front of the library. It was right around 8:00am and the lamp lights were still on, and the fog was everywhere. With all the fallen leaves scattered across the grass and sidewalk, the whole scene looked very beautiful. The fall colors were soft and muted. I paused for a moment to take in the view then I wished that I had a camera to capture the scene. That's when I remembered that I did in fact have my camera with me. I had seen this scene a few times back in the spring and once over the summer after an overnight rain. The fog was beautiful, but I didn't have my camera those times. This time, my timing was perfect. Not only did I have a camera with me, but the scene was a lot more colorful!
Here is what I saw. This is a 90° view from East to South (left to right):
(Click to view 5000px × 1000px size on Flickr.)
I did not have my wide-angle lens with me. Rather, I only had my 50mm prime lens. I could not capture the entire scene in one shot, so I did a 16 frame panorama instead. I think this was the first time I ever tried doing a panorama with my D300. In fact, I don't think I've tried doing a panorama since I upgraded to Photoshop CS3 (about a year and a half ago). I took the shots and I just finished combining them in Photoshop earlier this evening. Even with 4 Gigs of RAM, the Photomerge module took a few minutes to crank out a composite. The blending and aligning routines seem to be a whole lot better than previous versions of Photoshop. It came out perfectly aligned and blended. I was amazed.