They say: "If you don't like the weather in Iowa, just wait five minutes". We'll, I don't know about 5 minutes, but a day sure makes a difference. Ice storm here at Apple Haus B&B last night. Snow to follow later Saturday.Â
A great opportunity to take some winter photos. But the cold is hard on the camera (and photographer too) so some quick shots and back in where it's warm. All images were captured with the Fuji XT3, 35 mm f/2 lens.
Enjoy the sights of winter!Â
Today was a beautiful day at Apple Haus B&B in South Amana, IA. The rural landscape at our B&B offers incredible views of the spectacular sunsets as part of the Apple Haus experience. I like to shoot a sunset or sunrise with a "standard" focal length prime lens. My camera is a Fuji XT-3, so the focal length for a "standard" or "normal" lens is 35 mm. The 35 is one of the "fujicron" f/2 series. This lens is tack sharp and extremely fast to focus.
Creating a panorama in the digital age is quite easy. A series of overlapping images are captured in a portrait orientation (i.e. turn the camera to a vertical shooting position) with about 30% to 50% (max) overlap of the scene. The series is then blended in Lightroom. Manual exposure mode is required to keep the exposure constant for all of the frames. The image capture sequence begins with a vertical shot from left (image 1) to right.Â
The reason for shooting in portrait mode is driven by resolution. In normal landscape orientation, the Fuji XT-3 sensor is 6240 x 4160 pixels (standard 3:2 aspect ratio held over from 35mm film days). In the portrait orientation, you are getting a vertical resolution of 6240 pixels, max. The horizontal resolution depends on how many images you have and how much overlap between each images you have.
Tonight's sunset skyscape panorama was created from 5 images (see the thumbnail gallery below). Exposure for each image was 1/250 sec at f/4, ISO 160. After the stitching and cropping in Lightroom for edge effects, the final resolution is 12,974 x 4969 pixels. An image with this resolution makes incredible large prints. All images are captured in RAW format. The final pano file of merged images is also a RAW. Global and local edits are done on the RAW pano image in Lightroom.
To post on the blog, the pano image was down-sized for a width of 2048 pixels.
Enjoy the view!