Wild Night Panorama of San Francisco Pier 14

It takes and hour and a half just to drive there and my first trip was a bust. I can't blame the weather, or the location, or anything reasonable.  I just forgot my tripod!

But the second time I drove down to San Francisco's Pier 14 I came back with the images I needed to produce this beautiful polar panorama.

It is not often that I am able to take an vision from conception to completion without the project bucking off in wild directions.  Happily, at least in this circumstance, the end result is close to what I set out to create.

San Francisco Pier 14 - Night Polar Panorama

 

How's it made?

For those of you interested in the workflow, here is the readers digest version. Source imagery was a couple hundred images taken with canon 5DM2 and Gigapan epic pro.  I bracketed thinking I needed a HDR but it turned out the +2 shots had enough range for me so I dumped the other exposures.  I used Gigapan Stitch to compile the panorama.  If your interested in panorama software I am currently using both Autopano Giga and Gigapan stitch.  I don't know which is better---or maybe which is worse---they both crash a lot.

Anyway, once the gigapixel panorama was exported into Photoshop I used a plugin filter by Flaming Pear called Flexify 2.  My photoshop cried out-of-memory trying to process gigapixel images into polar projection so I ended up breaking the panorama into pieces, distorting them to polar, and then putting the pieces back together.  A few touch ups to the stitch alignments and some color correction and she was all done.

I really liked the end result but Aub felt that the original panorama (before it was distorted to polar) was just as good, if not better.  I have included the original gigapixel image below.  You be the judge.

San Francisco Pier 14 - Original Panorama

Comments

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