11/15/15 Featured Arkansas Landscape Photography–Autumn afternoon at Pinnacle Mountain State Park

Autumn in Arkansas—Pinnacle Mountain State Park

Taken with a Nikon D800e, Nikkor 24-120 lens @ F8, ISO 100.  Image taken in 3 parts and stitched together in PtGui and Photoshop.

This was just one of those days.  I had been out a few times previously, but the conditions did not equal this afternoon.  You have to wait until around 2:00 pm to get this shot as you want the sun over the back of your shoulder.  The light was perfect and Little Rock had a much better fall than other locations in Arkansas.  But the clouds, oh the clouds.  They started out as just some small swirls but as I continued to shoot they grew into this massive line that was turned upwards.  To get this type of a panorama, even with a 36Mp camera, I knew I would need to stitch.  However since my subject (main subject) was all off in the distance, I did not worry about a tripod, or setting my nodal point.  I didn’t need to, just aimed and shot.  I was using the Nikon 24-120, and was in the 90mm focal range.  The colors that afternoon were perfect also, but I did add a circular polarizer to help pop them some more and cut the glare.  You can clearly see the exposed part of the trail heading to the summit.  Pinnacle to me is best photographed from below as the view from the top is impressive, but surround by homes, roads and the like.

To make this image happen, I first converted the raw files in Adobe Lightroom, then opened them up in PtGui, (a panoramic stitching software).  The image came together perfectly and at first I thought I was done.  But on closer inspection, I found that during the stitching I had allow for blur on the center image.  It was only on the right edge and looked like a VR user error.  VR is Nikon’s vibration reduction that is built into some of their lenses.  If you are panning you have to be care with VR as you can confuse the system and it will not be totally finished.  When you take a picture like that the blur looks more like a rolling issue as some of the file will be fine but usually towards one edge you will pick up some vibration induced blur.

So I had to manually go back to another image and pull that one part back to this stitch.  It was not as hard as I thought it would be and the overall came out fine.