Panorama series of Nijmegen

Today I managed to post this series of Nijmegen panoramas that were made a year ago. At that time we wanted to have a nice panorama of Nijmegen so I happily embarked on this project. At the start I'd definately wanted a night picture of Nijmegen during the "vierdaagse" (the four days march) with all the carnaval and lights near the Waal river. So I set out with my camera and tripod to the opposite river bank and tried a couple of positions. 

At first I'd thought to have this done in no time but after the first couple of shots I soon realized it would take quite some time to do just a single long shutter time (on average about 45 seconds per picture) panorama (which consisted of about 12 pictures). I first started out taking some test pictures of the brightest and darkest spots within the panoramic view to find the shutter speeds to achieve the exposure that i'd wanted. After that I started shooting the panorama with about 25-33% overlap between pictures using a tripod and remote control. The remote control was definately necessary considering the long exposure times which are only available through manual shutter control ("bulb"). All settings used in the shots were set manualy (exposure time, diafragm, focus, and image stabilization disabled). This was generally going rather smooth except that ship trafficing was quite frequent. That mant that i'd needed to estimate if i'd be able to take a picture of a certain part of the panorama between crossing ships in front of the lens. As a result i'd needed to take a lot of pictures redundantly as a ship might sail into the picture right at the last few seconds of almost a minute exposure. Nevertheless, i'd rather enjoyed this challenge! It definately made it rather exciting to shoot a panorama. In general it took about 15 minutes to shoot each panorama. I also tried different shutter speeds so that i'd have different lightings to choose from in the end. All in all it thus took about 4 hours to shoot the night panorama series of which two of them are shown below.

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 18-55 1:3.5-5.6 IS II, ~45 sec, f/13.0, ISO 200]

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 18-55 1:3.5-5.6 IS II, ~35 sec, f/13.0, ISO 200]

Besides the panoramas I also couldn't resist to shoot a zoom picture of the "valkhof" park as it was nicely lit with a carnaval wheel in front of it. For this particular shot i've used the 70-300mm Canon lens.

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 70-300 1:4-5.6 IS USM, 15 sec, f/13.0, ISO 200]

But back again to the panoramas... Although we were pretty content with the night panoramas of Nijmegen we began to realize that a large canvas print of either one of these would be rather dark in our living room. So I began to think about a rather challenging panorama shot of Nijmegen at sunset. I went back to the opposite river bank of Nijmegen and setup the tripod and camera. As the amount of light varied immensily between the "sun" and "evening" parts of the panorama it actualy took me quite a lot of test shots and panoramas to get the exposure reasonably balanced throughout all shots. To help overcome the dynamic range problem a bit I also used a grey filter (2-stops) to compress the dynamic range of the light a bit. After some photoshop processing of the assembled panorama I was more or less able to achieve the picture I'd wanted. The only thing about It that didn't went according to plan is the saturated light at the sunset part of the picture but I was more than happy with it and we decided to print it as a large canvas for our livingroom :-)

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 18-55 1:3.5-5.6 IS II, 1/4 sec, f/16.0, ISO 400]

To illustrate the light difference a bit better I've also included a correctly exposed picture of the sunset part of the picture that shows the railroad bridge to Nijmegen below.

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 18-55 1:3.5-5.6 IS II, 1/45 sec, f/9.5, ISO 400]

I enjoyed this project a lot as It was quite challenging, but I must admit that I was also happy when i finally finished taking the night panoramas and get some sleep :-)  

Cheers!