Flare X3 -- Trouble X3 !

Well, I'm finally getting some time to get in on this WC. (Busy week at my house, with visiting grandkids and their pets, snow days, and an intestinal virus (grandkids and me). Finally relaxing tonight.)

This is a 7-frame pano stitch made from 14 exposures. (Blending each of the pairs of exposures first, and then stitching. That was the easy part. When I shot this in October 2006, I had just spent the night in the the bed of my truck, with my backpack ready to go.

CHALLENGE 1 -- Foggy Lens: When I reached the summit a little before sunrise, I discovered that my camera and lens -- which was packed inside my other gear -- were too well insulated. They were so cold from the overnight sub-freezing temperatures, that they fogged up, and not just on the outside. (My old 20D and Sigma lens were not weather-sealed.) As the Sun Rose, I just had to wait... and wait... and wait. Finally, the equipment fog cleared, but the Sun was now way above the horizon.

CHALLENGE 2 -- Triple Flare -- Triple Cloning: I was not prepared to fight the Sun shining directly into the lens. The shots I got with no huge flares all had problems, including my hand obscuring too much of the frame as I tried to shade it. (My only lens at the time was the first APS-C "super-zoom" which did not handle flare well.) As a result, three of the frames (6 images) had lines of big, bright, colorful flare spots. So instead of one set of flare spots in the stitch, I had THREE, in the form of radiating lines of colorful circles. My stitch looked like a kid was sitting in front of the camera blowing bubbles.

CHALLENGE 3 -- Gee, the Sun is BRIGHT!: In addition to the fog and flare, I found that I did not bracket quite enough to get the two-exposure blend I wanted for each of the seven vertical frames. I had to double-process the darkest set of Raw images, reducing the exposure an additional two stops in ACR,and then use those super-dark images for a three-exposure blend for four of the seven frames. Then after stitching, I still needed do to more repair work to try to fix that area of Sun shining into my zoom lens.

Software at the time -- and my knowledge of it -- was a far cry from what I have today, so I spent many hours cloning out the three trails of "flare bubbles" as well as fixing the bright spot. I wondered if anyone would appreciate this shot after I had worked on it on and off for weeks. I liked it, and hung it on my wall in a 12x24-inch frame. A colleague who was settling into a new home saw it and asked me how big I could make it. With a seven-frame pano, size was not a problem, so we decided on a print about 14x34 inches, so it would fit in a standard-size mat board. Turns out he grew up in the Adirondack town where I shot this! I know that many NPN members would not bother printing a shot with problems like this one, but sometimes content trumps technical issues.

Looking at it years later, I see better ways to try to "fix" that huge bright spot, but I think it would be better to climb that mountain again for a re-do! All in all, it was quite a learning experience! I learned that it is possible to fix mistakes, but more importantly, I learned to avoid some mistakes in the future!