#50 - Challenge Yourself (congrats nvitalephotography)

[Jonathan Huyer]

Wow Brian... great work. How much computing power did that take? Or did you just let it run overnight?

[bgood]

Wow Brian... great work. How much computing power did that take? Or did you just let it run overnight?

Overall, there were 28 unique positions of the camera and I did three shot brackets (-2,0,+2) at each position for the HDR. However, none of the programs I have is able to do a multi shot stacked panorama in HDR (I'm too cheap to get something like PTGUI Pro yet). So, I had to do each three shot bracket manually in Photomatix. For some reason the batch option in that program wasn't doing what I wanted it to do. Long story short, after doing the HDR manually on each three shot series I only had 28 images left. The freeware Microsoft ICE program handled the compositing easily on a standard PC. Photoshop takes a while with the image file as it is huge, but the computing power to create the image wasn't too bad. I was really excited, not by the image itself, but by the result in that when zoomed to full size, I can make out trees on the mountain in the background. It was fun to learn to do this. Now I need to find a location that's worthy of a gigapixel image.

While I've got you...great shot with the cats. As an avid outdoorsman and hunter, I always look forward to the wildlife images that you bring us. You always do such a good job framing the subjects to give such a natural feel.