High resolution panorama photography of portland japanese garden

You’d think that the amount of money I pay to Adobe each month give me a half decent app that stitches multiple images together to create a panorama, you’d be wrong. Photoshop collapsed into a gibbering mess every time I tried to stitch this multi-gigapixel panoroma together.

It’s not the first time I’ve been let down by ‘The Shops’ image stitching tool, so I had to break out the big guns and give ‘Autopano Pro 3.6‘ by Kolor a go. It did NOT fail and worked first time in spite of the complicated looking GUI.

Panorama Photography with Autopano Pro by Kolor

How I go the shot

My goal with this shot was to capture something different to the millions of other shots you’ve seen of this tree I found at some garden you’ve probably heard of.

I wanted shallow DOF to isolate the central trunk of the tree and capture a subtle bokeh effect on the leaves in the foreground and background.

To do this I used a 100mm f/2.8macro lens from Tokina which resulted in a tiny field of view. The only way to capture the entire tree and some of the surrounding area was to shoot a 30 image pano and then stitch the images together. That’s what broke Photoshop.

To capture all 30 shots I used the robotic TB3 tripod head from Emotimo.

Ultra Resolution

It’s not often that I need to print a 16ft wide image but with this technique I could easily fill a wall with a tack sharp print and still have some resolution left over. Not sure I could carry such a huge print though 😉

More to Come

I’m kind of hooked on this look that comes from having shallow depth of field in a massive landscape that’s actually wider than anything I could get from my wide angle lenses. Expect to see more of this impressive effect.

Disclosure

Kolor approached me last year and asked me to do a review of Autopano but it’s taken me this long to even give the software a chance to do it’s thing. Expect a full review later this spring when I’ve captured more ‘shallow depth of field panos’ like this one.

Published by Gavin Hardcastle

Gavin is a professional landscape photographer from Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, BC. He teaches photography workshops all over the world and writes extensively about his experiences on location. You can read his photo guides and tutorials here at Fototripper.com.

1 Comment

  1. Is this available as a hi res download?

    Reply

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