Photo: A panoramic view of Honolua Bay in West Maui near Kapalua.

One of the bigger panos that I’ve managed to shoot well enough to work. This view was a combination of 12 vertical images I captured on a golden hour excursion during the ‘09 Maui Photo Festival.

Since I was facing generally northwest with trees and mountains between me and the 7am sunshine, the light wasn’t the greatest. Still, I liked the detail in most of the final image and decided it post it here on the blog.

Click on the photo to view on Flickr and see a larger version with more detail.

Save Honolua

One last note about the area of Maui that this photo was taken. Its natural beauty is currently being threatened by commercial and private development, and one of the groups aiming to stop those threats is the Save Honolua Coalition. If you wouldn’t mind, take a moment to read the story behind their cause and follow their regular updates on the Save Honolua Coalition page on Facebook.

Mahalo,
– Kris

A pano stitched together with from 7 images I took during the last trip to Door County. If you’ve seen and read notes about that trip, that blue sky will seem rather out of place given the weather conditions I ran into, but it was a welcome sight.

Here’s the first pano I’ve stitched together since I upgraded to Photoshop CS4, consisting of 9 images I took from the 20th floor balcony at the Hyatt Maui Regency last September. While the process for PhotoMerge in CS4 isn’t that much different, what few new options they do have and whatever improvements they might have made behind the scenes seem to have worked better than what I was used to in CS3.

Having a newly installed OS certainly helped the speed of it, too.

The source images for this set were taken a little later in the morning, which meant the sky was more blown out than I had hoped. A few minutes after capturing these images, I dropped the frame down taking out the sky and filling the frame with just the resort areas below. I used those captures for this HDR shot instead, which I was really happy with.

An HDR shot I attempted because I wanted to capture something decent with this view, but the lighting of just a single exposure wasn’t right. The grassy area and trees in the foreground, which I ended up cropping out anyway, where just too dark and the clouds above me (also cropped) weren’t helping the overall balance.

Still, I was really stunned with the level of detail that I still managed to capture in the valley at the base of the mountains, and even the ridges in the slopes as well. I did more work than usual in post and with TopazAdjust to bring out some detail and take out some noise, and was very pleased.

Of course, it’s hard to get a feel for the image with this currently resolution, so click on it for a link over to Flickr and select the option to see it full size.

Photo: A look across the waters in Sister Bay on a cloudy autumn afternoon.

One of HDR images I put together from the few hours last weekend in Door County when those grey clouds in the photo weren’t dumping buckets of rain on us.

Still haven’t made it to a dozen HDR images in practicing, but so far I’m really liking the results.