After the Storm the Clouds Parted and...

Looking west from Hobe Mountain observation tower

I went up late yesterday afternoon to pick up the last of the prints from the " Florida In and Out of View exhibit at Jonathan Dickinson yesterday. As I entered the park the rains were just starting at the visitors center. well maybe a bit more than rains. An isolated monsoon was descending on the park. I sat in the car for a good 30 minutes before the lightning subsided enough that I could make the run into the building.

As I headed out of the park the rains were reduced to a drizzle and the clouds were starting to part. I took a few minutes and stopped by the observation tower on Hobe Mountain. The above shot is part of a 270 degree HDR panorama I shot of the parting clouds.

For those that want to know how:

1. I hand held the camera with auto-bracket set to do a nine shot sequence with one stop difference between each one. I overlapped each section to included details that the software could use to align them for the panorama later. Exposure was set to manual.

2. Imported into Lightroom to adjust the basic settings. I actually used the defaults as I was doing so much added processing in other programs. From Lightroom I selected three images from each bracket sequence and exported directly to NIK HDR Effects Pro.

3. In NIK HDR I processed the first section to bring out the colors and pop some contrast into the clouds. I then saved this setting to use with each additional section to help unsure the look was the same. For each subsequent set I picked the corresponding three images from each set in Lightroom and exported to NIK HDR.

4. NIK HDR saved the resulting seven sections back into the same folder as the original RAW files. At this point I selected the seven HDR tiffs and chose edit in Photoshop as a Panorama. Photoshop CS5 crunched on them a few minutes then presented me with a wide panorama. But the horizon was bowed upwards in the right half probably due to misalignment of the sections as I panned. Being more precise and using a tripod would have reduced this but I was there and the tripod wasn't.

5. I flattened the image to a single layer and selected the right side where the bow was. I then chose Warp under the edit menu in Photoshop. I pulled the horizon down carefully, good enough!

Looking from east to west, a 270 degree panorama from the observation tower, Hobe Mountain

The photo above is actually from that section. Below is the entire panorama of approximately 270 degrees.