Mountain Top
These are a set of photos I took a while back. They are posted here to showcase a somewhat niche and dying talent; the ability to create panoramic composite photographs manually. See back in the day, digital cameras did not automatically do this process for you. You had to take photos, combine them in a larger photoshop file and adjust each photo so that the lighting conditions matched throughout the image and that the focal lengths in each photo did not make perspective distortions that warped pieces of the image. This is also a beneficial skill modernly, because doing so manually rather than using the panorama preset, allows you to create much taller panoramas of wide-angle shots while being able to create wider tall shot compositions. Essentially being able to pad extra which would not be captured from a single panoramic pass. This technique can also be used to create very high-resolution photos of normal aspect ratio manually.
The top photo is of The Balsams Grand Resort hotel up in Franconia Notch, New Hampshire. The view is photographed from a mountain top across the valley from the hotel, this particular spot is called Table Rock, and is or was annually used by the Hotel to create calendars that they would sell in their gift shop.
The next photo is of the country club at the hotel looking out along the vistas of the New Hampshire White Mountains region. While not the most photogenic, the way the clouds contrasted the lands caught my eye and the experience was good practice in creating wide-shot composites.
Then we have The Northern Wastes, a photo of a foothill mountain near the NH and VT border around the town of Colebrook, New Hampshire. The area is, I believe known as Todd Hill. The photograph was taken at the end of autumn after the leaves had all fallen. What interested me about this location is just how desolate and remote everything looks. Again, while perhaps not one of the most photogenic areas, the area spoke to me a bit and was of course again good practice at refining this skill.
Lastly, we have two tall-shot composites I put together from the same day as the first photo in this set. The hotel photo on the right is taken from same spot as the wide-shot seen above and many of the photos in that image are the same photos that are used in the wide-shot. This gives some comparative contrast as to just how vastly the exposures and levels in photos in a set can be. While the wide-shot is much darker and the tall-shot is considerably brighter, when I made these images I took the brightness, contrast and exposure as the average of all the shots used in each photo. This allowing for minimal adjustments per photo. All of the photos were taken with the same exposure settings and F-stops and brightness settings, yet here we can clearly see how massively different the average of those levels are, for all of the photos used in each set.
The image on the bottom left is of a pedestrian crossing sign taken at the base of the mountain trail up the mountain to Table Rock. Oddly enough this is actually on the other side of the mountain with respect to the hotel. I took the photo to help commemorate the day and also because I happen to greatly enjoy hiking. The sign being located almost immediately in-front of the trail head parking lot, seemed to me to be the best way to illustrate the idea of hiking, especially with the mountains in the background.
The Country Club
The Northern Wastes
Hiking (left):
Hotel in the Mountains (right):
