Following on from the news of my new camera, somewhat dwarfed by the the other content in this post, and developing my ideas and techniques from the HDR experiment I did in this post, I am now pushing the limits of my creativity!!!

First: A Little technical jargonnery.

My new camera, the Canon EOS 450d is 12.2 megapixel, rather high quality and in general a really awesome bit of kit. As a first DSLR I could wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone. But the important point is, that unlike my old camera, this one provides RAW support. Raw is the data that is picked up by the sensor inside the camera, before any processing has taken place.

In creating a JPEG file from this data, the image data gets applied a white balance, which cannot be undone. It is then also stored in a 24bit format (JPEG) which loses a lot of the resolution for the dynamic range of graphical data. In english the quality drops, never to return.

This particular RAW format is 14 bit, So it should now store enough detail to prevent me from having to take 3 or 5 pictures of the same scene at different exposures, in order to get this exquisite detail throughout the range of the exposure, as I did in my previous HDR experiment.

So I did a panorama in RAW, this time with a slightly different technique. A “Panorama” as discussed here, consists of a tripod, and lots of overlapping photos which you merge digitally to make one big picture.

I ended up with 8 or 9 RAW images, that looked something like this.  

I picked the most typical or most important one, and fine tuned the settings, recovering the detail from underexposed areas using the detail stored in the 14bit resolution of the RAW file. Once I’d finished mucking about, I saved a 32bit TIF file from it (like this), then did the same using the identical settings on all 7 other ones. So by this point I had a full range source collection, with all of the detail recovered, and the colours reasonably balanced, looking something like this:

Then I went into photoshop, chose File > Automate > PhotoMerge, and selected Reposition only method.

Once it had finished I just did a little fiddlery and a slight rotate, then a crop, and was left with this.

Its essentially an HDR panorama, with a 30.6 megapixel resolution! Of ocurse I squished it for this page as you wouldnt want to download a 4mb JPG file. Now it’s not perfect, it looks a little washed out since its my first go and it took me all of 30 minutes, but I’m very proud of it, and I intend to make many more like it in the future.

Looking at my prevous attempt at HDR, I think the term “Leaps and Bounds” is apt.

I am very pleased….Next stop - The Lake District!!! Stay tuned…..