360 night panorama of San Francisco from Wolf Ridge with monolith cartoons

Posted on December 2, 2012 by joe

360 night panorama of San Francisco from Wolf Ridge with monolith — by Joe Reifer

I was shooting 360º night panoramas up at the abandoned Hill 88 missile site in the Marin Headlands last Sunday. The interactive 360 pano below includes a view of San Francisco and a tall concrete monolith. I was telling one of my friends about a humorous series of 2001: A Space Odyssey cartoons by the artist Will Guy, a.k.a. goopymart, when I shot the pano. An enterprising monkey sells bones to the other monkeys, and they strike the monolith. In a follow up cartoon, monkeys are seen driving a monolith repair van with a bone on the roof.

I was planning to display the cartoons next to the finished panorama, but decided to see if I could just embed the photos directly into the 360! Look for the goopymart cartoons on the monolith in the panorama below. You can also link to two other 360 views from Wolf Ridge right inside the panorama. The virtual tour links work in both the Flash and HTML version of the pano. Looks great on an iPad!

Update April 2013: This virtual tour now includes cross-dissolves between panos, an interactive map, and directional sound that emanates from the monolith (dissolves and sound are not iDevice compatible).

Pioneering the world of full moon abandoned places 360 panoramas with embedded cartoons since 2012.

Night panorama: A dragon dreams of San Francisco from a cold war missile site under a full moon

Posted on November 28, 2012 by joe

A dragon dreams of San Francisco from a cold war missile site under a full moon — by Joe Reifer

A waxing full moon. A collapsing radar site in the Marin Headlands. A dragon. Zoom in to see the Bay Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge, and Mount Tam. Here’s a gyroscope enabled version of the 360 for iPads and iPhones.

Technical details: 8 shots with a Canon 8-15mm f/4L fisheye lens at 10mm on an EOS 60D. 6 shots around at -10 degrees, 1 shot up at 70 degrees, and an offset nadir. Each exposure was 75 seconds at f/8, ISO 800. The final resolution is just over 14,000 x 7,000 pixels (98 megapixels).

Wolf Ridge: San Francisco at night from the Marin Headlands

Posted on November 27, 2012 by joe

San Francisco at night from the Marin Headlands — by Joe Reifer

On a clear night, when the weather conditions are just perfect, the view from Wolf Ridge in the Marin Headlands is stunning. Star trails and airplane lights create patterns in the sky in this 53 minute long exposure. The waxing full moon was high overhead, and the fog stayed low and out on the water. The San Francisco skyline was clearly visible, as well as the Sutro Tower, and antennas on San Bruno Mountain. Below is a crop of the left side of the image that shows the Transamerica Pyramid and top of the Golden Gate Bridge.

San Francisco at night from the Marin Headlands (detail) — by Joe Reifer

Glowing Figures and Dark Shadows: 360 Night Pano Technique and Extreme Lightroom Noise Reduction Settings

Posted on November 23, 2012 by joe

360 Night Panorama of 19th Century Stone Ruins — by Joe Reifer

Figures rendered in glow-in-the-dark paint walk in the shadows of these 19th century stone ruins. Explore the interactive version of the 360º panorama below, or here’s a gyroscope enabled iPad and iPhone version of the pano that you can navigate by moving the device. Point your iPad up to the sky and spin around!

360 Panorama Equipment and Exposure

This spherical panorama was shot with a Canon EOS 60D and a Canon 8-15mm f/4L fisheye lens at 8mm. Four exposures were made with the camera in the vertical position on a Really Right Stuff PG-02 panohead with a 192 FAS nodal slide. Each exposure was 2.5 minutes at f/8, ISO 800.

The weather was in the low 60′s at 9:30pm when I made this image. Under typical full moon conditions, the exposure time for these panoramas is about 1:15 or 1:30. Because the moon wasn’t quite full yet and this area was quite dark, this image needed a longer exposure time. Even with doubling the exposure time for an extra stop of light, I still had to boost the exposure in Lightroom by +0.60. The resulting image was incredibly noisy.

Extreme Noise Reduction in Lightroom

At first glance, I didn’t think the pano would be usable. Normally my luminance noise reduction settings in Lightroom have an amount between 2-10. I cranked up the noise reduction to twice those settings, but the noise still looked terrible. I tried various Photoshop noise reduction tricks, but still wasn’t happy with the massive luminance and color noise in the shadows. After some experimenting, I was able to get the noise reduction right by turning the detail slider way down. If you’ve got a really noisy image, you may need to sacrifice detail in order to smooth out the noise. I increased the sharpening settings slightly to compensate. A before and after noise reduction comparison is below, along with the Lightroom noise reduction settings.

Lessons Learned for Future 360 Night Panos

This is by far the most noise reduction that I’ve ever used on a finished image. Next time I’ll use Long Exposure Noise Reduction (LENR) in the camera. When shooting panos at night, it’s important to keep the exposures short and not wait too long between exposures so the stars stay aligned properly when stitching the image together. Some Canon digital SLRs such as the EOS 5D Mark II, allow you to shoot right away without waiting for LENR to run. The LENR is held in a buffer until you finish all of your shots, and then runs on the images in the buffer. This technique would have allowed for slightly crisper images with less post-processing.