As the title of this post says, your panoramic shots don’t always have to be in the standard panoramic format you are used to seeing. This past weekend a few other photographers and myself made a trip up to Rock Island State Park in Tennessee. I had never been and had heard great things about it, so I was up for it. It was a beautiful place and I plan to go back and get more shots in the spring or fall when there is more color.
While we were there the water in the river was very high. Our area has had an incredible amount of rainfall this month and it is supposed to continue this week. I’m sure you are thinking a lot of rain means better waterfall pictures, right? Well, not always and this one of those cases in which it was not better. The waterfall and river was full of run off and both had basically turned brown and muddy. I am not a fan of muddy waterfall pictures, but I was there and I was going to be taking some photos. Now the waterfall itself was roaring!
I decided to try something a bit different. I took a set of shots to use as a square format panoramic shot. When I say “a set of shots” it was way more than I had imagined. I took 50 shots to make the panoramic shot below. Putting it together almost killed my computer and my patience.
After I had the shot stitched together, I was able to combat the problem of the dirty colored water by converting the image to black and white. I like the final image. I’ll show you both images so you can see why I did not like the color one.
So, you’ve got two tips today…try shooting square format panoramics and if you encounter a dirty waterfall, convert to black and white 
Here’s the color image. The name of the falls is Twin Falls, but it may as well have been Diarrhea Falls on this day.
And here’s the final black and white image, which I much prefer.
2 Comments
Cecil, the black and white photo is outstanding. How long did it take you to get all of this together? I am just curious. I think that the photo merits all the time that you spent. It is outstanding!
Patsy, I can’t really give you an accurate time frame. My strategy was basically tell the program to stitch it and walk away. I came back to check on it every 15 minutes or so until it was done. I would guess it took somewhere around 45 minutes for the program to stitch all the images together. Then the file was so large, converting it to B&W took the computer another 15 minutes or so. The final image after the B&W conversion was around 900MB (in TIFF format). I found a megapixel calculator online that said the final image was 143MP with an aspect ratio of 1.57:1.