Eagle Field Junkyard Full Moon 360 Panorama
Six interactive 360º panoramas are included in the full moon virtual tour of Eagle Field. Look for the red hot spots to navigate between panos. If you’re on an iPad or iPhone, you can navigate the pano by moving your device around. My portfolio site has more night photography from Eagle Field.
Panorama Gear and Technique
All of the panos were shot with a Canon EOS 6D and an 8-15mm fisheye lens. I used a Really Right Stuff PG-02 panohead on a Nodal Ninja rotator and leveling base. The files were processed in Lightroom and stitched using PTGui Pro. The interactive panos and tour were created using Pano2VR.
Most of the exterior shots were 90 seconds at f/8, ISO 800. The exteriors are 4-shots-around at 12mm with a 5th shot to patch the ground (nadir). The interior of the hangar was 6-around at 15mm plus a zenith (up) and nadir (down). Shooting 6-around provides more resolution, but 4-around was necessary outside due to the fast moving clouds.
Even with the short exposures, blending the clouds between shots was sometimes difficult. In the junkyard image above, the Enblend plugin for PTGui did a better job with the clouds. Enblend couldn’t stitch the foreground well, and the stars weren’t as sharp. So I output a second version with the standard PTGui blender, and combined the two files in Photoshop.
Blending bracketed exposures without that HDR look
The shot of the plane outside the hangar required a lot of dynamic range, and includes 6 bracketed images at each camera position. The 5-shot bracketing available in the EOS 6D’s custom menu worked well, but only goes up to 30 seconds. I switched the camera from M to B and used a timer remote for a longer exposure of 75 seconds at each camera position.
PTGui’s Exposure Fusion was used to combine the bracketed exposures. I’ve been impressed with Exposure Fusion’s ability to quickly create natural looking images. The controls are simple, with only 4 sliders. I’ve found that about .5 of highlight reduction and .5 of shadow boost with a Sigma setting of .11 is a good place to start.
Reducing the orange glow of Sodium Vapor lighting
Before stitching and blending, I wanted to reduce the intensity of the orange sodium vapor lighting in Lightroom. Placing the white balance eye-dropper on a silver airplane or gray sidewalk yields a color temperature of 2000K. This makes the sky a deep intense cyan that looks wrong. A tungsten balance of 2850K looks a lot more natural. I finally settled on a slightly warmer 3250K for the overall scene.
The easiest first step for neutralizing sodium vapor is to switch to the Camera Neutral profile under camera calibration (the bottom panel on the right in Lightroom’s Develop module). This also works in Adobe Camera RAW. Then I slightly reduced the orange and yellow saturation in the HSL panel. This looks more natural than using bigger desaturation moves to deal with the orange cast, especially when the image will be viewed alongside other photos from the same location.
I hope these technical tips are helpful for a few people!
