Pano: 3 Hour Sail by cameronknowlton

This is a 3x6 panoramic shot of Victoria's Inner Harbour, spanning from the Fairmont Empress Hotel on the left, to the Undersea Gardens on the right. You can see the BC Legislature Buildings in in the centre background, and the lower causeway. I did a panorama of this location before, but from the other direction. This one includes the BC Legislature Buildings (often mistaken for the Parliament Buildings, which are actually in Ottawa).

This set of 17 exposures was taken with my Nikon D600 and 50mm lens, using a circular polarizer to saturate the colours and push the exposures a little longer.

Since the light was failing quickly, exposure balancing was all over the map. The first images I shot were 5-6 seconds long (then another equal amount of time per frame for long exposure noise reduction). Not even half way through, I was pushing 20-30 second exposures, again waiting an additional 20-30 seconds for NR.

Fortunately, I had to do very little exposure compensation, relying on Hugin to properly fuse the images. I was pretty happy with its result, it saved me a lot of time. I spent 15 minutes or so in Lightroom editing exposure and colour settings in my single image of the Empress hotel. Then I copied those settings and applied them to the entire set of 17 exposures at once. I then I exported the whole stack from Lightroom and loaded them into Hugin.

I experimented with a few different projections with this panorama, testing them out in the Quick Preview window until I found one that I liked. This panorama is rendered using the Cylindrical projection, with "Exposure corrected, low dynamic range", "Exposure fused from stacks", and "Exposure fused stacks" enabled. That may have been overkill, as the fuser complained about no overlapping images, but I like the fused result over the non-fused version.

17 exposures, 21509 x 7597 = 163 megapixels, 797 MB LZW compressed 240 dpi TIFF, FOV: 172 degrees x 58 degrees. Nikon D600, Nikkor 50mm f/1.4D lens, circular polarizer, long exposures between 5 seconds and 30 seconds at f/11, ISO 100.