Evening light panoramas on Mt. Galbraith

I went on a short evening hike with my daughter and thought I would generate a few more immersive panoramas. This time (contrary to the last time I was there! see here and here) it was clear and even warm. This panorama was taken on the lookout point over Golden and Denver. This is right next to my favorite bonsaï-like tree there that you can see here. Make sure to click on the "view on Google maps" link to see it large and to use your mouse (or finger on a mobile device) to look all around.

I also took a panorama at the top in the same spot as I did last time. I was not aware that there was so much of a view up there as it was completely fogged in then. Not so much this time.

The next image is for comparison with an image I posted last post.

Hope you enjoyed these!

Winter in the rockies

A tree high above Emerald Lake in Tyndall Gorge, Rocky Mountain National Park.

Snowy evening at Beaver Brook trail

Beaver Brook trail is a nice little trail that leaves from Windy Saddle on the road up Lookout Mountain near Golden. I strolled a bit here with my camera last night and shot this fully immersive panorama that you can look all around in and really see what it is like to be here at sunset. Enjoy! See it really large by following the link to Google Maps.
Screenshot to have a thumbnail on social media shares:

Top ten most viewed immersive panoramas

As some of my followers will know, I regularly create immersive panoramas of places I visit. I often share these using google maps as that is one of the only places that can actually show them on a variety of platforms and that doesn't use flash or java, both defunct technologies with major security issues. Anyway, one of the interesting things is that a lot of people apparently see these spherical panoramas and hopefully enjoy them. I thought I'd share these with you as a top ten. Unfortunately I can't embed them in here easily so you'll have to click the links to be immersed in them and hit your back button to get back to this page. When you open one of the panoramas, remember to look up and down in addition to around you. Some of these have some nice surprises in them. Enjoy!

990,507 views: Tarn beneath Mount Toll

This is a small tarn above Blue Lake in the Indian Peaks Wilderness. This panorama has been viewed 990,507 times. Yes, close to a million times!

787,930 views: Emerald Lake

This is Lake Emerald in Rocky Mountain National Park closely after sunrise. This is one of the first of these panoramas I ever made but I only recently uploaded it to Google maps.

492,690 views: Santa Elena Canyon

The mouth of Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National Park. You can see Mexico across the river. This point is quite famous and photographed many times at sunrise. The Rio Bravo river forms the border between Texas and New Mexico and was often a crossing point in the old west for outlaws to escape the US and now it is a crossing point for illegals to come into the US. You can just wade over basically. Big bend is a place I want to visit again sometimes for photography.

291,152 views: Andrews tarn and glacier

This is Andrews tarn and Andrews glacier in Rocky Mountain National Park

249,557 views:Blue Lake, San Juan Mountains

This is Blue Lake in the San Juan Mountains near Telluride. There are several Blue Lakes in the San Juans and this is the one that can be reached by hiking from the Bridal Veils waterfall power station.

127,557 views: Blue Lake, Indian Peaks Wilderness

Blue Lake sunrise. This is Blue Lake again in the Indian Peaks. The view is as very few people see it. At sunrise and almost wind still.

85,227 views: White Pocket

This is White Pocket in the Paria Canyon/Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, an absolutely amazing place. It is hard to reach with many miles of deep sand road to get through but well worth it in the end.

65,350 views: Little Hawaii

Little Hawaii. This is a "secret" waterfall close to Telluride in the San Juan Mountains. It is right next to a very popular trail but you would never guess it's here if you don't know about it. Locals know all about it but will not divulge the location. The GPS location I tagged on this image is not where it is supposed to be in respect of that.

53,482 views: Mount Falcon open space

Sunset from Turkey trot trail in Mt. Falcon open space near Morrison, Colorado. This is one of my favorite mountain bike rides in the foothills.

36,638 views: Shelf Lake

Shelf Lake approaching storm. Shelf Lake is a spectacular high alpine lake in Rocky Mountain National park that is only reachable through off trail travel. I got chased away from here by some thunder and lightning that day.

I hope You enjoyed these. Be sure to click through and look all around you.

Gate keepers

It's been a daunting task to keep up with the images that are being ingested into Lightroom. I have a set of images to share from the Great Sand Dunes, which I visited back in April. I've only shared some fully immersive panos from that trip but I haven't shared much in the way of actual images. See an example of one of such immersive panoramas here. Worse, I haven't been able to share many of my images from a trip to White Pocket in 2014! The best images from that trip except for the ones in the link are still locked up in my Lightroom catalog. At the same time, some revelations in digital imaging as well as the new panorama tools in Lightroom have made me go back to even earlier times. The image I share below for example was taken on October 31 in 2009 in Zion National Park while exploring the Narrows with my friend Dave. We were there just on the cusp of fall color hitting and once in a while we would find trees in the canyon that were in color like the one on the right here while the one on the left is still mostly green. We were in full wetsuits and at places we had to hold our gear above our heads as the water was near our shoulders. I was reminded of these images and the trip while hearing about the tragic deaths that occurred in the slot canyons in this beautiful park just recently. The image below is a stitched high resolution composite of 9 images along the gorgeous Virgin river in the park just a few days ago. I shot this with my D300 camera using the kit lens using my old homemade panoramic head. I stitched this using the new panoramic tools in Lightroom and edited and cropped. The native image is 7530x7530 pixels or 57 megapixels as I cropped from the full stitched image for a better composition. I hope you enjoy the image

Gate Keepers. Zion National Park. Oct 31, 2009. Stitch from 9 images, Nikon D300, Nikon 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 at 35mm, f/16, 2.0s, ISO 200.

Playing with the new panorama stitching mode in Lightroom CC/6

I've been playing extensively with the new panorama tools built in Lightroom CC/6 that just came out a few weeks ago. The quick and dirty conclusion is that it is not so useful for what people normally do with it, which is horizontal panoramas, but it is extraordinary at stitching the high resolution composites I like to do. Let me elaborate on this. Traditional horizontal panoramas are made by somebody panning (preferably on a tripod) the camera horizontally. What you would do is select the individual shots in Lightroom and then hit Photo-Merge->Panorama when you right/control click on the images. This brings up a simple dialog after a short while where you can select the projection and output your image. The good and the bad of this:
The good:

• Generates a 16-bit floating point pseudo raw file (a dng). This allows almost full control of the resulting image concerning white balance, shadow/highlights, etc. without any loss of quality. This is extraordinary and quite unique. Everything else will render a white-balance baked in file including my preferred method using hugin.
• Uses the full resolution of the input file
• Corrects for lens distortion, vignetting, aberration, etc. all automatically
• Corrects for exposure automatically
• Stitches are very high quality - I wonder what algorithm they use as it is different than Photoshop's merge to pano.

The bad

• Generates absolutely gigantic files with no way of generating a slightly smaller scale. It needs a slider with a resolution multiplier (i.e. 0.5, 0.25, 0.1, etc.)
• Very easily generates curvy horizons with no way of correcting this. This is the main issue in my opinion why it is not good for simple horizontal panos. If your horizon is not in the middle of the images it almost always generates a curved horizon. This cannot be corrected in any way as Lightroom lacks the adaptive wide angle filter you would use in Photoshop and the dng files generated in Lightroom cannot be directly edited without rendering them to tiff in Photoshop. The interface needs a way of dragging the images up and down to give you more control over this. The gold standard for panoramic stitching: hugin, does this with a few clicks and drags.

Interestingly, these pros and cons actually make it extraordinarily good at stitching the high resolution composites I have blogged about before (see for example this post). These are images that are built up from several rows of individual images. You will want to select the rectilinear projection (i.e what Lightroom calls "perspective"). An example is the below image that I never stitched before from False Kiva in Canyonlands National Park, an extraordinary place that is not shown on the park map or any of the USGS or USFS topo maps. The composite was done using 12 images arranged in 3 rows of 4. Each image was shot at 70 mm, f/16, 1/100 and ISO 100 using a Nikon 24-85 mm f/3.5-4.5 lens.

I on purpose left the images undeveloped and as you can see I exposed for the highlights not to blow out as you should always do with digital images. I simply selected these, let Lightroom put them in a panorama with perspective selected. What came back into Lightroom was a 14722x15848 pixel image (after cropping). I only had to rotate it lightly to get the horizon straight, change the white balance to a more appropriate value and play with shadows and highlights and here it is:

"Window on the world", stitched from 12 images from a Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 at 70mm, f/16, 1/100s, ISO 100.

To show you the incredible detail in this image, here is a closeup near the center of Candlestick tower, a prominent landmark on this side of Canyonlands.

Note that on a typical display, you are looking at a print of 12 ft x 13 ft or 3.6 x 4 meters, which is higher than a single story of a typical house! The slight softness you see here is owing to the fact that the lens was focused at the hyperfocal distance and not infinity and I was shooting at f/16 where diffraction should be evident.

So if you make high res landscapes using stitching, give Lightroom a try. The great thing is that it gives you a very flexible dng file that you can edit like any raw file with much more latitude than if you stitch with any other piece of software. The only "disadvantage" is that the image you'll get is absolutely gigantic.

Emerald Lake full 360 degrees interactive pano

Enjoy:

Views: equirectangular panorama of Emerald Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park at sunrise. More images from this place: http://smu.gs/1n7yt8W #landscape #panorama #sunrise #photosphere by Jao van de Lagemaat

Panorama at Upper Blue Lake

Here is a panorama done at Upper Blue Lake in the Indian Peaks Wilderness. The sunrise light was just hitting Mount Toll. I have a few more images from here to share. Those that want to look ahead can check out my Indian Peaks gallery on smugmug. Hopefully this can provide some sunshine in the rain and flood drenched Colorado.

Upper Blue Lake sunrise panorama. Buy a print. Photo on facebook. On flickr. on Google+.
Stitched panorama from 7 images. Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at 20mm, f/22, 1/3s, ISO 100.

Embedded Panoramas.

Finally there appears to be a way to embed 360 degree panoramas on web pages. I found the method detailed here. The premise of the article is over the top but if this works at least I'll have a platform independent way of embedding panoramas. There are some java based tools out there, but java is a security nightmare and there is a quicktime plugin method but this doesn't work on iPhones and Android. This might work everywhere although you have to apparently host the image on Google Plus which has the weird problem of lowering the resolution automatically. Perhaps it will work fine hosted somewhere else

This Panorama was taken on the tip of White Crack in Canyonlands National Park.

Dead Horse Point sunrise

Last February I went on a little trip to photograph the Moab area with some old and new friends. I've posted some pictures from a sunset in Arches already as well as Colorado National Monument. Interestingly, both those sets of images were taken when I had not yet met up with the group. Here I will post a set of pictures from after I met up with them, but rather ironically from me on my own again. This morning, I went out on my own as the others had thought that it would only be ugly and cloudy at our planned location - Dead Horse Point. However, I got out at 4 am to look at the sky and actually saw stars and so decided to go anyway and had a glorious morning.

Some links to start: Gallery and prints on smugmug. Gallery on flickr. On Facebook. On Google+.

Dead Horse Point Sunrise. Buy a print.
High resolution composite from 9 images. Nikon D600, Nikkor 24-85 mm f/3.5-4.5 at 45 mm, f/22, 0.4s, ISO 100.
This high resolution composite has over 100MP of resolution and will print wall sized with impeccable detail. I aimed it to have the curve in the tree trunk mirror the bend in the river as well as potash road which you can see just below the river.

Thelma and Louise. Buy a print.
Nikon D600, Nikkon 70-200 mm f/4.0 at 70mm, f/5.6, 1/80s, ISO 100.
A detail showing the island in the sky region in Canyonlands National Park. The title is a reference to the fact that the movie had Thelma and Louise drive into the "Grand Canyon" in this spot.

Dead Horse Point Sunrise Panorama. Buy a print. You definitely should see this larger as the blog format is not very wide.
Stitched from 7 images. Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at 16 mm, f/16, 1/10s, ISO 100.

Swoop. Buy a print.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at 16 mm, f/16, 1/6s, ISO 100.
A horizontal framing of the top image on this post.

Cradled. Buy a print.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at 24 mm, f/16, 1/6s, ISO 100.
There are many nice compositions to be found along the rim as you can see.

Red Dawn. Buy a print. Another image you really should see large.
Stitched from 9 images. Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at 16 mm, f/16, 1/20s, ISO 100.
This is a little later in the morning and taken from the very edge point of DHP. The tree on the far right of the image is the same tree as on the first image above. Standing on this tip you feel really exposed as just over the edge is a looooong way down.

Green River overlook

On my Arches/Canyonlands/Moab trip this February, I visited False Kiva by myself on the last day (more on that later). After the hike there and back I found myself driving back down around lunchtime and decided to have something to eat at the Green River Overlook, which is itself close to the Willow Flats campground. I couldn't resist taking pictures as the light was quite nice for midday because of the milky clouds and the snow all around. Here is a quick handheld shot panorama focusing on the river basin and Turks head.

Canyon Country. Buy a print. On flickr. On facebook. On Google+.
Stitched from 8 images. Nikon D600, Nikkor 70-200 mm f/4 at 70mm, f/8.0, 1/400s, ISO 100.

You can very clearly see the White Rim road down there which I biked several times. It looks very different down there. I also never noticed the remains of a landing strip (click on the image for a bigger view which clearly shows it) on the finger of the white rim that points towards Turks head. It's not marked on the topo maps, so I am curious what its function was. There was some Uranium mining in this area decades ago. Here is a zoomed in image of the landing strip. Click for 1:1. People on retina screens already get the 1:1 served in line.

On the right bottom you can see the white rim road snaking along and it crosses the end of the landing strip. Probably the strip is invisible from the road.

Evening over Denver

Impressions of the great smog cloud ;-)
These are some images I took testing out a rented Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. Truly an amazing lens. Incredibly sharp, even hand held. Heavy though. Be sure to click through for much bigger versions.

Denver dusk panorama. Buy a print. On flickr. On Facebook.
Stitched from 17 handheld images, Nikon D600, Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 at 70mm, ISO 800, 1/80s, f/5.6

Color layers. Buy a print. On flickr. On Facebook. On Google+.
Nikon D600, Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 handheld at 200mm, ISO 1800, 1/200s, f/5.6
On the original you can see the individual cars on Colfax avenue. You can also see that air quality sometimes leaves something to be desired in the Denver metropolitan area. The blocky structure up front is NREL's new solar covered parking garage.

Eldorado canyon sunset

Eldo sunset. Buy a print.
Extreme resolution composite from 9 images from D600, Nikkor 24-85mm at 50mm, f/11, 1/15s, ISO 100

Eldorado Canyon is a hidden gem just south of Boulder. I went out this evening to play with my new D600 and shot a few images of which this is one that I stitched from 9 images taken using my normal method for high resolution composites resulting in a about 180MP image that I finished off in Lightroom 4. On a large print you will be able to count 10's of climbers scattered all over the rocks.

Snowy dawn

Snowy dawn. Get a print.
Handheld panorama from 5 images, Nikon D50, Nikkor 18-55 mm at 18mm, f/8.0, 1/800s, ISO 200.
Image on flickr. Image on facebook. Image on Google+.

One of the joys of shooting raw is that you get the chance to redo images shot a long time ago but with new technology. Amazingly the above image for example has many times more resolution than when I originally assembled the panorama in 2008. It also has much better color gradation and noise characteristics. Regardless of that, I have always loved the image but I like this interpretation best. This image was taken while we were leaving from the Goodwin/Greene hut in the mountains south of Aspen. The sun had just come up and was peeking through the clouds after a fresh snowfall. One of the best views ever in my life.

An outerworldly glow

Panorama assembled from 25 images (3 rows of 5). Individual shots using D300, Nikkor 35 mm f/1.8 DX at f/8.0, 1/40s, ISO 200.
Buy a print.
Flickr image. Google+ post.

Sunset from a popular pullout along the road up to the top of Lookout Mountain and Buffalo Bill's grave. I had these lying around but never did much with them but decided to stitch them. The stitched image is 100 MP but that is only about half of the available resolution. The colors were really this strange at the time. You can see downtown Golden in the middle, the two table mountains, the buildings of the School of Mines, the Coors factory (between the two mesas) and the skyscrapers of downtown Denver towards the rightmost tree (probably not in the copies for the web though). Several years ago I shot a very similar dusk panorama on one of the very coldest evenings of the year that this should be compared to:



I wrote about that specific outing at the time as an example of how inspiring such outings into crazy weather can be. Surprisingly it is still online!

iPhone panorama of the Loch and Loch Vale

This was created by 6 shots on my iphone4 (non-S ;-) ) in HDR mode. I stitched them together using hugin later. I did have my phone stitch a similar image using the autostitch app which looked great too, but it lowers the resolution (probably a setting somewhere I should change). I slightly warmed the tone in Lightroom but otherwise this is as is. The image is about 12 MP resolution. Click on it for a much bigger view. It is quite impressive what you can do with a cellphone nowadays.


The Loch iPhone panorama. Buy a print.
relevant Google+ post.

Sunset panoramas on the Great Sand Dunes

These are images I created during sunset on the great Sand Dunes. I have many non-panoramic images both from this sunset as well as the next day's sunrise. I haven't had time to work everything up but in the mean time thought I'd share these panoramic images with you all. This place is absolutely magical during sunset and sunrise and I would highly recommend heading out on the dune during those times. Hard to keep your camera from gathering sand inside though as during sunset the wind can blow quite hard.

All these panoramas are extremely high resolution and will print superbly at the largest sizes available. Prints will not have my logo on it (many people email me to ask). To get a better impression click on the image to get a much larger version.


Dune ridge sunset. 13 images at 18 mm, f/16, 1/30s, ISO 200, D300. Tripod. Buy a print. Clock on image for bigger.
This is right at sunset on a ridge near the high dune. I was photographing lines in the dune to the right and decided to make a quick panorama. You can clearly see my trail leading up to my position on the left.


Sunset on the Dune 2. Stitch from 10 handheld images at 18mm, f6.3, 1/50s, ISO 200, D300. Buy a print. Click on image for bigger.


Dusk on the dune. Stitch from 18 images, 16mm, f2.8, 1/20s, ISO 800, handheld. Buy a print. click the image for much bigger.
This is on the top of the high dune after sunset. The full moon is visible on the left. The wind was blowing like crazy.

Much more to come.

Black and white conversions of snowy landscapes

I was rummaging through old material in Lightroom recently and I noticed some shots from an awesome multihut ski trip I did a few years ago (2008) with some friends. I wrote then about it on my blog and my friend Teresa actually made a writeup of that trip at that time here, where you can see some of the very few photographs that ever got made of me (elusive guy). I am in the red wind shell most of the time in the pictures from Teresa.

Anyway, I noticed that I never got around stitching several multi-image shots I made back then. For weight I was carrying my old Nikon D50 with the kit lens and I did not bring a tripod (more booze could be packed this way). In some cases I was doing handheld multishot panoramas to create higher resolution landscapes. If you do this right, they can still be stitched well even though you might have to do a little touch up afterwards. I worked up a few of these lost landscapes and below I'll post some. I am most focusing here on the aspect of black and white conversion as I noticed that this really works well with some of these. For example, this shot from the front of the Goodwin/Greene hut was captured around sunset. The sun was coming through a thin cloud of snow crystals and generated this absolutely gorgeous light. I cannot believe I never stitched this image.


5 shots using a Nikon D50, 18-55mm kit lense at 18mm, ISO 200, f/10, 1/320s. Assembled in hugin. Pretty much as shot - no nasty HDR. Buy a print

This image really has to be seen large, which you can if you click on the link. To get back here use your browser's back button.

I converted this to black and white in Lightroom simulating a light red filter which again has to be seen large.

Buy a print

Another new image that I really like is this panorama of our group coming up on a pass, rising out of a foggy valley.

5 images from a Nikon D50, 18-55mm kit lens at 30 mm, ISO 200, f/11, 1/500s. Buy a print

In the same place, but looking in the other direction, I took this image:

6 images from Nikon D50, 18-55mm kit lens at 24mm, ISO 200, f/11, 1/500s. Buy a print.
At the moment, my blog's banner has another version of this image that was taken a few minutes later after the clouds on Castle and Cathedral peaks cleared up a little. This cloudy view is also quite nice and will print really nice large for on your wall ;-)

I have several more images waiting to be born in my library from this trip. We'll see when I get to them. I still have a gigantic backlog to deal with with some very nice images in them too that I haven't spoken about yet. I have a little picasa gallery of new snowy black and white conversions here.

Resolution of stitched images revisited

I was recently asked while shooting at Mesa Arch by a fellow photographer who saw me use my wooden panohead jig what using this contraption gained me. I was reminded of this going through some shots from yesterday. I went to Eldorado Canyon state park in the snow storm to shoot some images of the awesome rock formations there (I'll post images later). I compared a guide image with a stitched image and was struck by the amazing amount of extra detail.

Here is the full image to guide you. On the left the guide image, shot at 18 mm, f/11, 1/15s and ISO 200 using my 18-55 mm kit lens. This lens is amazingly sharp if used correctly. On the right, the assembled pano, rendered at 65 MP (Full rendered resolution is about 95 MP, but I rarely render the panos that large) from 9 shots at 48mm and same settings as above. This is a 12 MP Nikon D300.


Guide image. The screenshots below are slightly left of the center.

Of course at this size, there is no way to see any difference. It just illustrates how well this technique works. The guide image is almost identical to the stitched pano zoomed out this far. This is essential to me as it is otherwise very hard to compose shots. In this case, I wanted the lines of the awesome Fountain formation rocks to diagonally go to the right bottom corner. To compare resolution, I upscaled the single shot NEF file to the 65 MP resolution and show the comparison below at 1:1 (click on the image for full resolution - you might have to click again to get it at 1:1 on your screen).


Left: 12 MP image upscaled to 65 MP. Right: 65 MP stitched image of the same composition.

Even at the zoomed out size of the screenshot that I placed inline above, you can see the enormous difference in resolution. Note that if you look at this screenshot 1:1 by clicking on it, you are looking at the equivalent of a 65"x100" print (I am assuming your monitor is about 100 ppi - the reduced size image inline above is equivalent to a 27x42" print). I don't need to tell you how well the stitched image holds up even at that size. Because this is crazily large, I was curious how well this translates to smaller prints. So I downscaled the stitched image to the same resolution as the single 12 MP shot. Again, click to see a 1:1 image.


Left: single 12 MP image. Right: 65 MP stitched image downscaled to 12 MP.

Amazingly, even here you can see better detail in the stitched image. This is happening because of the Bayer mosaic used in the sensor of this camera and some lens softness. It cannot actually record as sharp of an image as it pretends it can, making a downscaled 65 MP image look signifcantly better than a native 12 MP one. Note that the 12 MP image was sharpened appropriately in Lightroom. At the 1:1 size, you are looking at a print of about 28x43" so this is still quite a large print. It is hard to show this on a screen, but when I make test prints from these images at smaller sizes than 28x43", say 16x24" I still see an obvious difference. Of course, to many people that might not be that important. It is also not unlikely that only a fellow photographer will notice it at smaller sizes and normal people would have to be pointed to the difference. To me, the print gains a large amount of presence and reality. This method can be applied to almost any landscape situation - even waterfalls! - to improve resolution.

New panorama gallery

Smugmug has a new feature where you can create galleries with virtual links to images in other galleries. I love this as I no longer have to reproduce the images in multiple places so that folks can find them. One example is shown in the little flash slideshow below, where I made a gallery of horizontal panoramas gathered from other places. They automatically get a link to originating gallery. Check it out. Full-screen slideshow in this link.