This panoramic image was very much the result of a planned photoshoot.
My wife Liz and I had spent a couple of hours climbing in the hills behind Deganwy on the North Wales coast, overlooking the length of the Conwy estuary.
On the way back down we took a diversion to look at the view from a rocky outcrop, and I saw this magnificent scene.
Only it wasn't quite so magnificent on that occasion, in mid afternoon under a flat grey sky the view looked distinctly underwhelming.
However, I saw in my mind's eye how this view could look at sunrise, if the horizon was clear behind us to the east, allowing the warm early rays of sunlight to stroke the scene.
So I added the spot to my 'go back to' list, and the following mid April, with the promise of a clear dawn, I returned very early in the morning to that same overlook.
Arriving with plenty of time to spare, I made a very careful camera / tripod set up, assuring everything was level and the horizon stayed central in my viewfinder throughout the 180 degree sweep of the panorama.
This is important to me, as although Photoshop can stitch panoramas made from less than perfectly aligned exposures, you tend to lose a lot of pixels in the process, whereas a correctly leveled camera will make the subsequent panorama stitching a lot less wasteful of image real estate.
A two stop neutral density filter helped with balancing the brightness between sky and land, allowing me to increase the exposure of the individual frames and thus get more detail in the darker parts of the scene.
Having set everything up as I liked it, I then made several sweeps of the scene, each sweep needing around 14 seperate exposures with around a 40 percent overlap to cover the entire length of the estuary that I could see from my high vantage point.
The light improved as the sun came up, first splasing golden light across the mountains to the west, and then lighting up the estuary itself.
This panoramic stitch was made from the last set of exposures that I made that morning, as after that the light quality deteriorated, losing both its warmth and low angled subtlety.
After I processed the final image, I realised that it was too big to appreciate fully as a still picture, so I made this tracking video so I (and hopefully others) could enjoy the view a bit more.
Filename - conwy estuary panorama 01.jpg
Camera - Canon EOS 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 45mm
Exposure - 1/40 sec @ f8, ISO100
Location - Conwy Estuary, North Wales
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC
Comments - Panorama made from stiched exposures
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