Lobster Traps & Buoys
This is the wharf at Thurston’s Lobster Pound in Bernard, Maine on September 12, 2016, 17:56. I took it during a panorama workshop that I was co-instructing with Acadia Images Photography Workshops. The wharf was in shade while the sun was hitting the boats in Bass Harbor in the background. I wanted a selective focus on the buoys and ropes with the lobster traps and harbor providing a blurry backdrop and plenty of negative space on the wharf in front of the pile of buoys to blur as well, like a tilt/shift lens effect. It’s about a 48mm field of view, so I could have shot it with a 45mm f/2.8 tilt/shift lens, but I don’t own one. ;-) Instead, I used my 70-200mm f/2.8 at 200mm, f/2.8, ISO 64, 1/160, focused on the buoy I wanted to be the sharpest, chose the corners of my scene, and shot a bokehrama of 7 columns and 6 rows. I rotated every 5° and tilted every 5° for plenty of overlap, because the focus distance was only 29 feet away and the blurred out foreground was even closer. I aligned it with PTGui Pro and blended it with Photoshop. I cropped it to a 5 x 7 ratio for easy printing because that’s nearly what it was already after stitching. The finished panorama is a little over 630 megapixels (29735 x 21239) and can easily be printed 10 x 7 feet without enlarging.
The full panorama can be explored here. Zoom in to see how much detail there is: http://www.aaronpriestphoto.com/panorama/2016/2016-09-12_BassHarbor/
Camera settings: 200mm, f/2.8, ISO 64, 1/160.
Stitching data: 6 rows of 7 images for a total of 42 images.
Equipment used: Nikon D810, Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR II, Really Right Stuff TVC-34L tripod & pano/gimbal head. RAW conversion to 16-bit TIFF via Lightroom, aligned via PTGui Pro, and blended in Photoshop.
