Turning around

There’s an exercise that used to be popular in landscape workshops. The instructor would have all the students line up on what they thought was the best — for them — image to be made at some location. He’d — and it usually was a he — would go around and look at the picture each person was about to make. Then he’d ask everybody to spin their cameras on their tripods and make a picture of what was directly behind them.

Hold that thought.

Today I was working with this set of 13 images. I started out with 39, but HDR blending wasn’t working right, and I tossed the over and the underexposed images.

I got the idea of seeing how few images I could use to make a good pano, and I managed to get the number down to five:

Then remembering the turn-around-and-look-the-other-way exercise, I told AutoPano to stitch the eight images that I’d discarded. Here’s what happened:

It’s not the most wonderful image in the world, but it’s a whole lot better than I thought it would be.