Pano: Looming Legislature by cameronknowlton

This is a 3x7 panoramic shot of Victoria's Legislature, commonly known as our "Parliament Buildings" (which are actually in Ottawa).

This set of 21 exposures was taken with my Nikon D600 and 50mm lens. I wanted to capture the whole scene, but without the fountain, so I backed up as far as I could get, then captured the set of 3 rows x 7 images on my standard tripod.

A wider angle lens was clearly needed, but that would have introduced additional distortion, so work in progress...

I dropped exposure compensation for the central images, as they had a lot more lights than the outlying frames. I spent an hour in Lightroom editing exposure and colour settings in my wider photo that includes the fountain and the whole buildings in a single frame. Then, I copied those settings and applied them to the entire set of 21 exposures at once. I had to compensate each frame slightly to get its exposure under control, then I exported the whole stack from Lightroom and loaded them into Hugin.

I experimented with different projections at this point, testing them out in the Quick Preview window until I found one that I liked. This panorama is rendered using the Equirectangular Panini, but I also tried Architectural (too squashed, cropped the statue at the top of the frame), and Mercator (also very cool, but bowed, as if the building were circular.)

21 exposures, 7993 x 19189 = 153 megapixels, 174 degrees x 88 degrees FOV. Nikon D600, Nikkor 50mm f/1.4D lens, 15 second long exposure at f/13, ISO 320.