After the last panorama on the road bridge I packed up and started walking back towards my house thinking that I needed to seriously rethink my locations. Whilst walking back I remembered about the Sports fields next to the County Cricket Club that's always flooded at this time of year. I walked up there to find it looking more like a lake than a field!
The lighting was fantastic and because the water was still, it reflected the sky brilliantly creating a nice balanced image that looks kind of surreal and enticing. I'd liked to have gotten a lower angle but I had to stay behind the fence because I didn't want to fall in with the camera! I wasn't quite able to get a full 180 degrees here because of trees, fences and other unwanted elements but I still managed to achieve a pretty wide field of view.
Here's the first attempt, not bad at all! I'm really pleased with the composition of this, I tried to loosely follow the rule of thirds to ensure the image was spatially balanced.
In this one I was midway through shooting when some passing children threw some sticks into the water. At first I thought this would've caused problems when stitching but it actually looks pretty cool. It needs some manual adjustment to be properly seamless.
One thing I didn't notice until I got home is that on quite a few of my images there is some kind of dark smear on them. I couldn't see this on the viewfinder at all. I made sure to clean the lens when setting up at each location so I don't think this was the issue. The lens has marks where it looks to have taken a fairly serious fall at some point so I think that this may be the reason for the smear.
I think I will most likely just try to eliminate them by adjusting the layer masks to hide them. If this isn't possible I'll have a go at manually removing it using the cloning tool in Photoshop.
On this one, I'd just started shooting from the right hand side when I looked up briefly to find a single engine airplane flying directly towards me at a fairly low altitude. I thought it'd be great if I could capture this in the scene and quickly started a new panorama. I was thinking I'd maybe be able to mask the images so that the plane is visible in each shot, therefore showing the path of the plane, capturing a movement that you normally wouldn't be able to. I tried this out and it didn't really work as it I'd imagined, the distance the plane had moved in each shot was not enough to create the effect I wanted. I think I was just too eager to capture it, had I been calm I could've waited for the plane to move more between shots. I ended up just leaving one shot of the plane in as I think it makes a nice addition to the scene. I had a go at removing the smears in this one by masking them out and it worked pretty well.
The Timelapse
Once I'd had several goes at it I thought I would create a timelapse of this scene similar to what I was planning for the Sabrina Bridge idea. The problem with this was that the tripod doesn't have angle markers so I had no way to know how much I was actually moving the camera. I did try to create markers on a piece of tape around the tripod but it didn't work that well.
Because I had to guess the amount of overlap between photos I was able to concentrate less on the timing of the shots. I looked online the night before to check when the sun would set and it was supposed to be 4:15pm. I started at around 4, taking a photo every 30 seconds over the course of 12 minutes. I expected it to be quite a bit darker than it was by the time I reached the end of my panorama but I still think it's a nice effect, especially as it gets darker towards the moon side.
Obviously for the final image I will mask all of the smears out but I'm pretty happy with this result.
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