I’m always second guessing myself when I take an image like this… it’s experimental and I feel I should keep the progress to myself until I’ve absolutely mastered the techniques.
However, in this instance, I think it’s safe to say I had forgotten that I’d even done this experiment until I was wandering through my catalog of images just now. I expect writing about it will prompt me to remember to practice the technique next time an opportunity comes up
I took a series of 12 shots of this yellow trumpet fish (Aulostomus maculatus) as I drifted past in a fairly slow current. I was just enjoying being weightless and wasnt concentrating too much on anything except maintaining my buoyancy. The fish and I happened to be at the same level as I floated past and using a fairly low power setting with my strobes, I fired off a series of shots, along the length of the fish. I was being careful to make each shot include some part of the fish that was included in other shots, otherwise, the auto-stitching would’ve been very difficult.
The resulting 12 shots have all stitched really nicely together using the Photo merge – panorama tool within Adobe’s LightRoom software. There’s a couple of glitches and the focus isn’t perfect and I put that down to the open aperture of f/5.6 that I used… when working close to an animal where you really want as much detail as possible, you really need a smaller aperture – at least f/11 but smaller would be better. For now, and for a first attempt at something which I hadn’t planned, I’m happy to just have something which stitches successfully!
If someone wanted the image printed at full resolution it would easily create a very high-quality image, just over 3 metres wide but at that size, every little detail really has to be perfect. Besides, I’m not sure I’ve got enough ink for that!
Click the image above to see the image at 50% size (yes, only half it’s true width and still 13mb! – I don’t have the space on my website and I doubt you’d want to wait for it to download!!!
