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This rather unusual view of the North Shore promenade and seafront hotels at Llandudno on the North Wales coast is the result of a rather tongue-in-cheek experiment one evening while out taking a stroll with my wife Liz at this iconic seaside town.
The sun had long since set, leaving the cool blue twilight sky just in a nice balance with the yellowy orange glow of the artificially lit buildings lining the promenade.
Ideal lighting for a townscape photo, but I found that wherever I pointed my camera I just couldn't find a composition that pleased my aethsetic sensibilities.
Then I hit on the idea of making a monster panoramic collage, taking the whole sweep of Llandudno Bay, right across from the Little Orme headland to the east, along the whole length of the promenade and ending up at the Great Orme headland and pier to the west.
My problem was that I was quite close to the hotels in the centre of my proposed panorama, and I didn't know how the Lightroom stitching algorithm would handle the parallax shift caused by my proximity to the subject.
Still, nothing ventured, so I went ahead and shot the thirty or so individual overlapping frames required to cover the whole sweep of the bay, making sure that the camera/tripod assembly was perfectly straight and level throughout, to give Lightroom the best chance of sorting out the resulting blend.
Loading the images into Lightroom for stitching, I was pleasantly suprised at how the blend turned out, with the central buildings looming large and the rest of the promenade tapering away to the edges of the frame giving a very pleasing perspective to the composition.
That's a lesson learned, and a way of shooting panoramas that I'll use again when circumstances are favourable.
Filename - llandudno panorama 06.jpg
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 40mm
Exposure - 5 secs @ f16, ISO100
Filters - 2 stop neutral density graduated filter used to balance the exposure between sky and land.
Location - Llandudno North Shore, North Wales
This image - 1200x126px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom and PhotoShop CC
Comments - Panoramic image made by stitching multiple exposures
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