The hall at Hellingly is the main attraction – huge and decorated with ornate ceiling roses. I’d been wanting to do a pano of this location for a while and actually forgot to do it the last time I went, this time it was in my mind from the outset.

This has been one of the hardest images that I have taken to process. I’m still not 100% happy, but it will do for now. This is a total of approximately 50 shots, 17  3 stop brackets at +/- 2EV. Each set was taken with the same camera settings to try to maintain the focal length, exposure and DoF, the only variable was the auto white balance in the camera itself. I processed each set in Photomatix using similar settings adjusting the gamma to try to get the brightness similar, processed and saved each. Top and bottom halves were done separately.

Each set was imported and stitched together in Photoshop. Luckily I have a new PC, so it was a fairly quick process. Once each was stuck together I layered one on top of the other and had to do some transformation adjustment to try to get everything to line up. This was partially successful.

Finally I had to do a bit of cloning to get rid of some highlights in windows and apply filters to bring out texture as the image as a whole was slightly flat.

Hellingly Great Hall panorama (Mark Blundell)

The final Image is 22,000 x 9000 pixels (1.8m x 70cm) and took approx 3 hours to process, by far my longest in a long time.

Next trip I’ll have another go and see if I can do a better job. It’s not particularly sharp, and was more of an exercise in ‘can I do it’.