Changi Village panorama

posted on 09:56 PM on Wednesday 02 April 2014

Took a day’s leave today to run some errands. Happened to be near Changi Village so Pauline and I took the opportunity to have lunch there. After lunch we walked to the beach where I shot a couple of photos intending to create a panorama. The above image is the result of that effort. I used a variable neutral density filter to cut down the light so that I can use f5.6 at a reasonable 1/500 shutter speed. I had to lower my shutter speed so that I can do a proper bracketing of the exposure. In the past, with that much light at noon, there was just no way for me to get the bracketing done right. The under exposed images could not be taken at the desired exposure and the aperture was too small resulting in diffraction issues. Originally I intended to do a HDR panorama which worked using a combination of Autopano Giga 3, Nik HDR Efex Pro 2 and Lightroom 5. However I thought that the result was just a bit too unrealistic. A panorama done using Autopano Giga 3 followed by Nik Color Efex Pro resulted in a much nicer image (shown above). The final image was a whooping 56M pixel in size taking up > 300MB of disk space. I am very impressed with the final image since all the 11 images were taken hand held. I am going to try taking a larger one and see if it is still doable.