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360° Panoramas!
I’ve been playing with 360° photography for several months. For me, this is a fun new way of doing photography.
The simplified explanation of the process is to shoot enough images to capture all directions, then stitch these images together (I’m using a program called PTGui) into a special format. To create the image below, I shot from a drone at 200′, in RAW to capture the wide range of brightness from shadows to sun reflections, then processed the images in Lightroom, sent these processed images to PTGui to generate the panorama, cleaned up the sky a bit in Photoshop (there’s a hole where the drone is – the camera can’t shoot straight up), then generated the final image using PTGui.
Some of my 360° panoramas have been shot with my camera on a tripod, while others have been shot from a drone. I’m still experimenting and learning.
The 360° panorama below was shot from a drone at 200′ above the beach just north of Brackett’s Landing. Click and drag, or use your mouse scroll wheel, to look around. Click on the square in the upper right corner to view this full screen (highly recommended!).
Fall Colors in Tumwater Canyon
In October I drove to Tumwater Canyon, which lies between Stevens Pass and Leavenworth, to get some photos of the fall colors. If you haven’t been there when the colors are “on”, you really must do it. The reds come on early (see “Fall Colors on Stevens Pass” in the Photos page), followed a couple weeks later by the yellows and oranges.
The photo above was one of the ones I captured that day. It is of Tumwater Dam, just a few miles from Leavenworth. This photo has been added to the Photos page.