Photo from October 11, 2011
I found this unfinished photo stitch while randomly going through my Aperture library.
Central Park, New York City, New York
Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70 f/2.8G
10 exposures (1/320 – 1/125sec) @ f/5 iso 200, 24mm
Without photos, all I’d remember about this day was that I lost my Fitbit because the leash finally broke off. With them, I see I took this because I thought the rowboat would be ideally positioned in the frame despite the overcast day.
I made my first digitally produced panorama in 1995. It was painstaking to try to get Photoshop to align images that were improperly taken. Ever since Sony introduced panning scan in-camera panoramas (now standard in the iPhone), people stopped being awed by them. Still the quiet beauty of an old school dSLR stitch can be appreciated when small details are examined.
In panoramas, it is still important to compose with the principles of all landscape outdoor photography: foreground interest and anchoring. Foreground interest provides depth and is provided by the rowboat and vegetation kept in-frame for the entire scan. Anchor the edges with something (in this case the tree on the left and the couple walking along sidewalk on the right) because there must be a reason for being.
Beyond that cropping was limited by what I shot and to reduce the busyness of the fence in the foreground and some of the people walking on the sidewalk. The weather is nothing that a little black and white photography and the proper filter can’t fix. I also did my usual film curves adjustment and chose a slightly cooler tone.