View of the north and south summits of Mt McKinley, locally called "Denali", North America's tallest mountain, 20,320 ft., from a small pond along the George Parks highway. Canon 1Ds Mark III, 70-200mm (145mm), .08/sec @ f/10, ISO 100
For a few years now I’ve had some photos on display at the Alaska Coffee Roasting Company in Fairbanks. If you are passing through Fairbanks, they have fresh daily roasted coffee and it some of the best I’ve encountered, and that includes many locations around the nation. In November of each year, I refresh the photos hanging on the walls and I’ve been in the process of picking some new imagery to replace the old. The display sizes are mixed with prints of 20×30 inches and 20×53 inch panoramas. This year I decided to go with two new panoramas of Denali, the mountain. These are both created by merging multiple files in Photoshop. In the analog days of film, I shot with Fuji’s 6×17 medium format panorama camera but gladly gave it up for the technical flexibility, versatility and creativity afforded by shooting my Canon full frame camera and a full array of lenses. Having said that, not all scenes can be captured using at stitching method and I realize that. In particular, scenes with a lot of movement present significant challenges. Additionally it can be difficult to really establish composition when you can’t see the actual full scene through your viewfinder. In time, however, I’m getting more sure of what will work as a panorama. The stitching process is quite simple using Photoshop Cs4, but my digital specialist Andrew Johnson (who is pretty savvy and proficient in grading RAW files) discovered that the use of “Fill” in Lightroom 2.5 can hinder Photoshop’s ability to intelligently render the panorama. Now we use that sparingly prior to the stitching process and the success rate of PS handling the merge is quite good.
Morning light and clouds over Mt McKinley (Denali) North America's tallest mountain (20,320 ft) and Wonder Lake, Denali National Park, interior, Alaska. Canon 1Ds Mark III, 24-105 (70mm), 1/8 sec @ f/13, ISO 50
