Spent about 4 hours at Bele Chere

Participated in Ditlo 2009, http://www.flickr.com/groups/ditlo-asheville/

It’s hard to get Caedmon out of the house sometimes, and this is the look you get from him when you do.

Asheville Mardi Gras was happening downtown on Sunday.

I took over 8GB of photos from Down Under, and am just now going through the workflow.  Expect more here shortly.

It took 46 shots and 3 1/2 hours to stitch together.  I actually took about 150ish pictures, but only needed 46 to complete this.

Howto Create an image like this:

Step 1: Set a manual white balance in your camera. If you do not, you may be suprised at how different some of your shots are from eachother, expecially around light sources.

Step 2: Stand in one place, zoom in (I used 70mm on my D80, which is a 1.5x sensor) till you only have a chunk of your surroundings in focus. Take your shot. Move the camera (but your body as little as possible) to another zoomed area with at least 10/15% of the content of the previous frame. Try twisting the camera in new and interesting ways, so you don’t have all landscapes and portraits.

Step 3: Keep Shooting! If you have a feature you wish to make prominent in your final product, make sure that you get extra shots (overlap 50-70% on those areas, or take multiple shots).

Step 4: Download and resize all your pictures to something like 600×800. Open Gimp/Photoshop or any other layer-capable graphics program.

Step 5: Make a new image, with a white background layer, large enough to hold all your 800×600 shots. (I’d start at something like 3000x3000px). Now copy in each picture as a layer, change the opacity of the layer to somewhere between 40% and 70% (I like 50%). Make sure that each layer has the same oppacity. Use the free transform tool to rotate the picture over the previous ones, and move it carefully in place. Repeat on each picture you wish to add. The more pictures that overlap at a given place, the crisper and darker it will appear in the final image.

Step 6: Save a copy in your standard format for your program (.xcf for gimp, .psd for photoshop) with all the layers. This “original” will allow you to tweak your layers later, then do an export as a JPG, and you are done.