Traveling the Journey of Light | Photoblog Thoughts, feelings, and techniques behind the photography of Derrald Farnsworth-Livingston

How to Chisel More Image Detail Out Of A Photo of Mt. RushmorePosted by drfl on October 15th, 2009

There are many resources on the Internet that explain how to create a panoramic photograph utilizing mainly wide-angle lenses. In fact, I have yet to read an account of someone using anything longer than about 70mm for panos. The goal of most panos is to show an elongated landscape photograph, giving the image a width or height that is not achievable with the lenses while at the same time preventing some of the perspective issues that may arise with using an ultra wide angle.

These panos sometimes go so far as to include a 360 degree view of one’s surroundings and they usually create a very large image with more megapixels than which the camera is natively capable. An example of a previous image in which I used a wide angle lens to achieve this result can be viewed on my June 15th post, An Evening at the Ballpark.

Something I try frequently, though is using a longer lens to create an image with more detail than could be captured with a single frame. An opportunity to test this arose while I was visiting Mt. Rushmore National Monument. Here I had a perfect chance to photograph each face individually using my 300mm lens and then stitching them together for a large megapixel image. The main points to remember when creating these panoramas:

• Try to keep the camera as level as possible, using a tripod really helps with this.
• Make sure there is plenty of overlap with each subsequent image. Err on the side of large overlaps - digital is great in that we could take 10 images to make sure there is enough data for one that may have been able to be captured with one.
• When creating a horizontal panoramic, take vertical images, and when creating a vertical panoramic, take horizontal images. This will allow for the maximum detail for both width and height.
• Use only one aperature for each image, changing the aperture setting can effect the Depth of Field and as a result, the stitching process.

For this Mt. Rushmore pano I took these four images using my 21 Megapixel Canon 5d Mark II with a 300mm lens at f/8 for maximum sharpness:

 
It is evident I had huge overlaps with each photograph. I could have even used a longer lens than the 300 or my 1.4x teleconverter, but since I wanted the best image detail I stuck with the prime only. I then processed the “Washington” image using Photoshop and then loaded the images concurrently into Photoshop, applying the same settings to all four images.

I then copied the “Jefferson”, “Roosevelt”, and “Lincoln” images in order into the “Washington” image as new layers and then selected all the layers. By selecting “Edit > Auto-Align Layers” in Photoshop and then selecting the “Auto” option, these layers then become one long image as they are placed next to one another overlapping with the shared data. By keeping the layers selected, apply the blend with “Edit > Auto-Blend Layers”. This blends the color differences and other minor issues together into a seamless image. I finish the panoramic process by flattening the image and cropping out the extraneous data. This leaves me with my final image that I can then proceed with other color correction and other modifications.

With this Mt. Rusmore image, I ended with a 32 megapixel image. Evidence of the detail available can been seen in this 100% unsharpened crop of Washington’s eye (click for full size):

Obviously, I could have done this in a single image, and I took many while I was there, but this gives me the ability to print large with very refined detail.

Technical Details:
Canon 5d Mark II, 300 f/4l lens, f/8 - Multiple Images
This image is available on my website at: A Mt. Rushmore Panoramic