Sunrise on Pioneer Peak

» Posted by admin on Mar 21, 2010 in Dave Taylor | 4 comments

I love my life. What can I say. This scene (yep, the same location as last nights image – see the previous post), is just 14 minutes from my home. In Alaska, you don’t need to go far to find wild lands.

For those of you that are interested in the “making of” this image: this is a 4 image stitched pano, shot with my 5D mk 2 and the 70-200L f4 IS. I turned the camera 90 degrees by rotating the lens collar and shot each image vertically, this forces the photographer (yep, that’d be me folks) to shoot more frames to get the same composition the photographer (uhuh… yep, still me) he or she would have if they had shot it with a horizontal orientation. What does all that mean? Simple, more photos to cover the same area equals higher resolution. Higher resolution equals higher quality. As a side note, that darn 70-200L f4 is sharp… darn sharp. It’s lighter than the f2.8 version, cheaper and just as sharp… if not sharper. There’s a rock about 200 yards from the summit of Pioneer Peak, I’m pretty sure I can read an inscription on that rocks surface from here on the RAW file…

Anyways… each shot was taken in manual exposure mode, manual focus and with IS turned off (I was shooting from a tripod and using a remote release in Live View mode, it’s a carbon fiber tripod with a Kirk BH-1 ball head, so it’s pretty much the most solid platform on the planet). I used a polarizer filter to accentuate the reflection and deepen the blue of the sky and then added a Singh-Ray 3 stop soft edge grad ND filter in a Cokin filter holder to hold down the exposure in the sky and add drama. Note to the planet – this is the only proper use of drama. If I want drama otherwise, I’ll turn on TNT. You need to be careful with a polarizer on wide angle landscapes (or panos) that include a lot of sky – it’s easy to get uneven exposures. One trick is to back off a bit on the polarization.

The key to panoramic photography is to first level your tripod, very carefully… especially when standing on a platform of rotting ice next to a recently unfrozen glacially fed river (read: still cold). Then, attach the camera to your tripod head and level your camera once you have the basic composition decided on. The best way to level a camera is still one of the absurdly overpriced 2 axis bubble levels that mount on your camera’s hot shoe (that silver thing on top of my camera that I usually use to rest my chin between exposures when I’m really tired). After the camera is leveled, I check my polarizer positioning, make sure I am at the setting I want, fine tune my exposure and then pan through the comp one final time to make sure the comp is level. One final focus check, using Live View zoomed in at 10x. Then pan the camera to the left most shot of the pano and shoot (preferably with a remote release and mirror lock up engaged/Live View engaged. But if you don’t have a remote release, no worries – a 2 second timer works just as well). Then pan right to the next shot in your pano series, but make sure to leave an overlap with the previous shot (usually 1/4 of the frame or so) and shoot again. Rinse, repeat, and reuse as needed until you have all the images needed to make your pano.

So, to highlight the important steps: manual exposure and focus set once and not changed during the pano, careful with the filters (especially polarizers), level your tripod and camera, remote release or short timer to fire the camera. Oh, and always wear clean underwear.

Pioneer Peak Sunrise Over Matanuska River, near Palmer, Alaska ©2010 Dave Taylor/Sixtyone North (Canon 5D mk 2, 70-200L f4 IS @ 70mm, 1/2" @ f/14, ISO 100. B+W CPL @ Singh-Ray 3 stop soft grad ND)

Stay tuned…