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Out for a walk on Conway Morfa with my wife Liz late one summer's evening I wasn't expecting anything dramatic in terms of lighting as the sky to the west was a solid bank of cloud.
So I'd decided to go walking without my usual accoutrements of tripod and LowePro, just enjoying the evening, the scenery and my wife's company.
Imagine my chagrin then, when the clouds on the western horizon parted to let the last rays of glorious golden sunlight bathe the town of Deganwy on the far shore of the Conway estuary, while up above the now broken clouds picked up those same golden rays in a blanket of light.
All pretense of a gentle evening's stroll gone, I ran for the car, grabbed my camera bag and tripod and ran back down the beach to the first suitable spot I could find, fortunately not too far from where I'd left a very understanding Liz.
Have you ever tried extending a tripod while running over rocks? Not for the faint hearted!
Anyhow, I arrived at my spot gasping and panting (note to self - GET SOME EXERCISE!) and hurredly set up my trusty Canon 5D on my tripod. The light was great so the rush was on to get some photos before the sun disappeaed over the horizon.
I knew I wanted to get a panoramic composition of this scene, as the beach, estuary and buildings were arranged sort of long and thin, rather than the usual aspect ratio achieved with a normal photo.
Normally when taking a set of photos for subsequent panoramic stitching I'll spend a lot of time getting the tripod and camera perfectly level, as this helps greatly in getting a good quality stitch.
However, in my rush to set up and catch the light my levelling efforts were perfunctory at best, and I ended up with a set of exposures that weren't quite straight.
When I got round to processing the images, and let PhotoShop do its stuff in stitching them, the final result came out looking like I'd taken it with a fisheye lens. The horizon was seriously bent.
I'd never used the warp tool in PhotoShop before, but I used it now and was delighted in how easy it was to straighten that wonky horizon.
I'm so glad I was able to rescue this panorama, as the subject matter and lighting were just gorgeous. And how could I have faced Liz having run off to take photos only to have failed? It doesn't bear thinking about.
Filename - coast panorama 04.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 47mm
Exposure - 1/5sec @ f11, ISO100
Location - Deganwy, North wales
This image - 1000x350px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS5
Comments - Stitched panorama required warping in Photoshop to straighten horizon.
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