This first one is a panorama consisting of 8 stitched together shots. It's of Baltimore's Inner Harbor, from Federal Hill Park. This is one of the classic locations for photographing the Inner Harbor area.
I used a Pentax K10D and 50-200 lens (at 50mm). Bogen 3001 tripod. Exposure of 0.3 sec. @ f/11. (Manual exposure mode, about 1 stop more exposure than the camera wanted, to compensate for all the sky in the picture which was tricking the camera into underexposing a little.) Manually focused. (I typically use manual focus on panos, as I want all the frames to be focused for the same distance. In this case I could probably have just used auto-focus, since they'd likely have all been focused at infinity, anyway.) ISO 100. Shutter tripped by hand, but with 2 sec. delay.
The picture was made right around sunset, several months ago, as it would be getting dark enough at that time that there'd be plenty of pretty lights, but it wouldn't be nighttime dark. Basically, I wanted dusk, not night. (I generally prefer the look of cityscapes at dusk, to their look during mid-day or night.)
The resulting pano is more than 18000 x 2300 pixels in size. (But I've greatly reduced the size and converted it to jpg for posting to this forum.)
And yes, that thing way over on the left edge of the frame is indeed a cannon. In April of 1861, as the Civil War was getting underway, the hill was occupied by Union troops under the command of General Benjamin F. Butler. They erected a small fort there, with cannon pointing toward Baltimore's business district. Their goal was to guarantee the allegiance of the city and the state of Maryland to the federal government, under threat of force. (Maryland was a slave state, and if it had seceded from the Union, Washington DC would have been surrounded by hostile forces.) This fort and the Union occupation persisted for the duration of the Civil War. A large flag, a few cannon, and a small Grand Army of the Republic monument remain to testify to this period of the hill's history.
This second picture is of the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, up on N. Charles St., in Baltimore.
I checked ahead of time to make sure there were no restrictive rules against photography in the cathedral, and I tried to time my visit so as to minimize disruption of religious services, wedding rehearsals, etc. All in all, I had around 90 minutes to take some pictures.
The camera used was my Pentax K10D. Lens was the 18-55mm "kit lens," at 18mm, and an aperture of f/9. (At f/9, depth of field was more than enough to keep everything sharp, so stopping down any further would just have unnecessarily lengthened exposure times, and anyway past f/11 or so a decline in image quality can be an issue.) The camera was mounted on a Bogen 3001 tripod, and triggered by remote. (The remote was a Pentax Wireless Remote Control C, purchased from Ace Photo Digital, via amazon.com, for under 4 bucks. See, I use only the finest, most expensive, camera gear.)
ISO 100. And since the interior of the cathedral was somewhat dim, exposure times were well into the multiple second range. Well, it's not like the cathedral was in rapid motion, after all.
Camera orientation was vertical. And as I like a lot of overlap between images that are to be stitched together into a pano, I took 20+ "slices", covering over 180 degrees.
Really though, many of the "slices" consist of a digitally blended set of two or three exposures. One at the nominally correct exposure, one 2 stops over, and one 2 stops under. Since this was the only way to get both some color in the stained glass windows, and some detail in the shadows. Just too much range there to manage it all in a single exposure.
And yeah, the result of all these .tif files was a honkin' big final panorama. Several hundred megs in size.
The image presented here is a .jpg of that pano. Shrunk way down in size, and compressed some. Because sharing an uncompressed .tif that's 12500 x 4600 pixels in size on this forum wouldn't be all that friendly.
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Michael
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