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Battersea Panoramic
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| Living in London is sometimes taken for granted, but no matter where you go there is an abundance of interesting scenes to shoot. Battersea, in the Borough of Wandsworth, is located on the South Bank of the River Thames in South-West London and home to the iconic Battersea Power Station and Battersea Park. I have a particular passion for panoramic photography even when a simple 16mm shot is good enough, I still love the look of the 'widescreen' view. It adds a dimension that is not achievable using a wider angle lens and when it comes to print it offers lots of interesting variations on the standard box shape. The simple way to create beautiful panos is to use Photoshop's Photomerge tool, this will normally produce good results but you will still need to use the Warp and Crop tools to adjust to your desired look. Photomerge has several options and the best advise I can give is to experiment with them and find your settings, what I mean by that is certain settings will work different depending on your shots... If you first learn how the settings work then you can take your shots to compensate, almost like reverse editing! Below are the 2 shots I used to create this panoramic. |
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Chelsea Panoramic
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| I can't say I have ever seen this shot before, probably one of the least popular scenes over the River Thames in inner London. I on the other hand find this fantastic. The awesome Chelsea Embankment and the riverside boats with the World's End Estates standing prominent, across to Chelsea Harbour and Battersea in the far distance. I represents a slice of the South-West that normally gets overlooked. This panormaic is pretty simple, all I am adding is about 25% extra length to the shot but the trick is to cut the top and bottom perhaps 10% each to produce that cinematic widescreen view. Another tip which should be pretty standard is the timing, each shot should be taken as quick as possible, the movement in the clouds will be the most noticable obstacle to overcome while the water ripples always seem to easily blend together. The sunset itself can cause issues as you can see from the 2 shots below, the sun quickly dipped during the few seconds it took to take the shots. There are several other tricks to make panoramics much easier, these I will go into in much more detail at a later date. |
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