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.
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’.
Very impressive work – this would have killed my PC for sure – and I think the answer is “yes, you definitely can do it”! Would love to see the massive version of this!
Outstanding work mark
I have one word here today for this: Masterpiece. I really appreciate the amount of time and effort that went into this, Mark, I am very very impressed. What a scene you’ve managed to capture and bring to us! The amount of details here to take in is just extraordinary, to say the least.
Wow, Mark … A true testament to your talent, dedication and patience! If this is the “I can do it” version, I can’t wait for the “I can do it well” version!
Impressive shot, Mark! HDR panos can be a lot of fun but also a lot of work. I notice that you manually stitched the top and bottom rows. Did you know that Photoshop will automatically stitch XxY panos as well as 1xY and Xx1? I’ve shot 3×5 pane images and it stitches them beautifully in both axes as long as you make sure there is overlap along both edges.
Wow. Great work and I would say well worth the time you spent. Wow…