Chefchaouen, Morocco Panorama
Photo of the Day
The blue-tinted old-town of Chefchaouen actually looks a bit green in this panorama shot at dusk in Morocco. The new town glows orange while the medina is set apart by the green-tinted fluorescent lights obscuring the sky-blue walls of every building.
This panorama captures some of the peace ready to be found in one of Morocco’s less hectic cities.
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Edinburgh Panorama at Dusk
Photo of the Day
With this panorama, I wanted to try it from a different viewpoint than the shots frequently seen from Calton Hill or Arthur’s Seat. While those are, of course, great views that I visited as well, this one gives a view of the city from within the city.
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Cape Town Night Panorama
Photo of the Day
At the very end of a job I was working in Cape Town, I was able to briefly escape up the beautiful Table Mountain for an evening and this panorama is the result.
On the job, we only had a rather massive studio tripod, so that’s what I dragged up there with me, but that turned out for the best. It was a windy evening and the stability proved handy. It was also useful to have the full ten feet legs at my disposal. I wanted to get slightly over one of the railings near the edge and needed to send a fully telescoped leg down to a ledge below to do it. Lengthy tripod legs were a welcome addition to my kit that evening.
Cape Town was such a photogenic city and I pine for a time when I can go back to spend more time shooting it.
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Barcelona Cityscape Panorama
Photo of the Day
Fortune and a bright, purple dawn smiled on my as I descended Montjuic Hill in Barcelona. After searching around for a good vantage point, I eventually settled on an area close to the site used for the swimming events in the 1992 Summer Olympics. I would have loved to have been inside that facility for its more unobstructed views, but I made the best of it when I realized it wasn’t going to be open any time near when I needed it to be.
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Ait Benhaddou Panorama
Photo of the Day
An almost 17-foot version of this panorama of Ait Benhaddou will soon be adorning the walls of one of my clients. It will be an absolutely giant print and should make for quite the decorative addition to his walls.
The oasis kasbah of Ait Benhaddou, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the desert hills beyond made for a striking contrast that was hard to capture in any way other than a panorama. The small river divides the new part of the town that features the hotels and restaurants from the old section that stands frozen in time.
The picturesque kasbah has been a filming location for a number of movies for obvious reasons. It’s a location with one foot in the past and that’s now by design – as part of UNESCO giving it world heritage status, the ksar is meant to be free of modern development, so the ten families that live there do so without electricity making the location go almost perfectly dark at night except for a few candlelit windows.
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Beeston Castle Panorama
Photo of the Day
The hill occupied by Beeston Castle rises up strangely from the middle of the flat Cheshire plain. For as far as you can see, this and the other small hill occupied by Peckforton Castle nearby are the only elevated points. The rest is as flat as England ever seems to get.
A panoramic shot seemed to be the only sensible way to try to capture the vista from on top of the hill. Blessed with an almost perfectly clear day, who knows how many English counties I could see over the tops of those ruins.
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Prague Evening Panorama
Photo of the Day
Prague’s innumerable spires pierce the sky in this evening panorama shot not too far from Prague Castle (St. Vitus Cathedral, inside the walls of the castle, is visible on the left side of this image). I love how the warm lights blasting the city’s more famous buildings makes them stand out dramatically against the dusky blue of the rest of the houses.
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Penmon Point Lighthouse Panorama
Photo of the Day
Penmon Point, at the eastern end of the Isle of Anglesey isn’t exactly the hottest of places on a January morning before sunrise, but I couldn’t help but be warmed by the sight of this lighthouse just off the shore. A beautiful sight.
Panoramic shots that include the sea can sometimes be difficult to stitch together – by the time you have moved your camera for your next shot, the waves have shifted and twisted the water’s appearance to make seamless joins a bit tricky. Extending the exposure time can help and it did for this photo. Visibly turbulent seas can be a handful when joining shots, so sometimes it’s better to have things looking a bit more smooth. Even more importantly for this shot though, the long exposure’s smoothing adds to the atmosphere of the image.
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Djamaa El Fna Panorama
Photo of the Day
Marrakach Morocco’s Djamaa El Fna is, simply put, wild. At any point in the bustling square at the heart of the city, you might find snake charmers, open-air dentists, food hawkers selling all manner of culinary oddities, carnival games, musicians and dancers, monkey handlers, brightly-costumed water vendors, wizened story tellers, boxers smacking each other, and who knows what else.
While it’s an interesting site during the day, it really comes alive in the early evening when the food stalls are set up, the hungry crowds roll in and smoke starts rising off grills and barbecues. It can be a bit of a sensory overload with those smokes wafting intense cooking smells, the musicians competing for audiences’ attention, a glut of interesting sights, and the masses of people pushing up against each other, but the best strategy, as with the nearby souks, is just to get lost in it all.
And after you’ve done that, sometimes it’s good to retire someplace a little out of the way to see the bigger picture. Rooftop bars surround the square and provide a bird’s eye view of the semi-controlled chaos below. Buy yourself a beverage and take it all in. That’s what I did and shot this panorama while I sipped a cool drink.
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Godrevy Point Panorama
Photo of the Day
I was recently inspired by a client of mine to gather together a number of my panoramic images and now I have a bunch in handy web-size format, I thought I would share some of them. For the next little while, we’ll have a bit of a panorama-rama.
The first installment comes from Godrevy Pont in Cornwall where I caught a few young lads’ fun as the sun started its descent. The cold waters didn’t deter them from using the rocks as diving boards into the ocean and its their frolicking that makes this photo for me.
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Plitvice Panorama
Photo of the Day
Happy 2011 everyone!
We finished 2010 with plenty of shots from Croatia’s wondrous Plitvice National Park and I have another batch of lovely waterfalls to share, so let’s get on with it.
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Cobblestones of Trogir
The old town of Trogir, Croatia is a tiny island composed of narrow, winding, cobblestone alleys. The texture of this particular stretch of road caught my eye.
Dalmatian Islands at Sunset
From high above Dubrovnik, the view to the North West is a sea speckled with tiny islands that all beg for some exploration (and anyone with a boat in Dubrovnik’s harbour will be more than happy to help you in that endeavour).
Here’s a panorama of this group of Dalmation Islands looking their best in a sunset off the Croatian coast. Click for a larger view:
Dubrovnik from Above
As promised, here’s a glimpse of what’s in store for visitors to Croatia. This panoramic view comes from near the station of the newly-rebuilt cable car that now whisks visitors up to the mountains above the city of Dubrovnik. Destroyed during the Yugoslavian civil war, the cable car has re-opened and now provides easy access to this majestic view of Dubrovnik’s old town.
At the station at the top, one hall features photos of the cable car’s original construction, shots of it after it had been destroyed and images of its recent re-construction. One worker there revealed his sadness at what had occurred during the war. He was 15 when it all happened, so these memories became a big part of his formative years. When asked if he considered Croatian’s friends with the Serbs that had carried out the attacks on Dubrovnik, he said, “We are neighbours. I don’t hate them, but I will never forget,” revealing the scars of a complex and awful period in the region’s history.
Dubrovnik’s scars are no longer exceptionally obvious on the ground. – you have to do a bit of searching to see the remnants of that recent war. But from this high up, you can forget about all that and just revel in the glorious view.
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St. Michael’s Mount Panorama
This will be the third Photo of the Day in a row that goes to St. Michael’s Mount and that’s just because the place is so cool!
It’s a castle on an island, just off the coast and it’s the stuff of fantasy novels. ‘Nuff said.
This shot was a bit more difficult to put together than most panoramas. I wanted to try to capture the bright sunset that was occurring in the right-hand side of the shot while getting the blue of the ever-darkening evening that was happening on the left.
The range of stops in the whole scene was too wide for one exposure, so I did a bracket of five shots for each component shot of the panorama in order to be able to catch all the lights and darks and worried about how to put it together later.
When it came time to put everything together, I had all the component parts I wanted, but I really wasn’t sure what was going to be the best way to assemble it. I tried using the stitching software to put the HDR side of things together while simultaneously stitching together the panorama. Nope, it would have been far too easy for it to work in one, nicely-automated process. I’ve used that technique with a small degree of success in the past, but it was with a slightly more static scene inside a church. No moving water, shifting clouds or changing light to deal with.
On the next attempt, I tried to put together individual HDR shots and then stitch them together. That didn’t work because the lighting and colouring of the HDR shots came out too differently from one another for them to seamlessly blend. This occurred despite using all the same settings for every shot in the HDR processing. When processing HDR shots, I usually take a more manual, hands-on approach to avoid it all turning into a glowing surrealistic mess, but I didn’t think that was feasible with a panorama. There would have been too many differences between each image again.
So, the next step I took was to process five different panoramas, one for each exposure bracket, then see if I could layer them together. This was what ended up producing the final shot, but it came with its own big challenge.
I only ended up using two of the exposures in the end. It was enough to catch the full range and it minimized my work a bit because the problem with using this technique is that the stitching software stitched each panorama differently. When stacked on top of each other, the differences were a bit more than slight. Good thing we have the handy dandy align-layers feature in Photoshop to help us through!
But that only got us part of the way down the road. After all that, I was still left with a tedious bit for retouching when it came to finishing off the alignment and blending of the two images. With a bit of patience, it was eventually finished off for a decent result.
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Photo of the Day: Fountains Abbey Panorama
The massive scale of Fountains Abbey can sometimes only be captured via a panorama (or standing really, really far back from it).
Darby Sawchuk is a Canadian-born photographer who currently resides in Manchester, England. He has travelled to over 40 countries and is always adding more to the list. He creates stock for multiple agencies and is available for assignments.
+44 0790 992 8932
