If you ask my wife, patience is not one of my virtues. I usually want instant solutions to problems, and you do not even want to be around me at Christmas (little kids have nothing on me!). However, in photography, I tend to have significantly more patience. I’m happy to wait several hours for a shot, and lately I find myself sitting on images for days, weeks or even months before processing them. This potentially has a lot of benefits: it helps us assess their artistic value without the excitement of having fresh images hang over our head, and it also forces us to be patient and thorough in post-processing.
The image I processed tonight benefitted from my waiting, I think. I took this panorama of Tuolumne Meadows, in Yosemite National Park, last August, but I haven’t processed it until tonight. Once I got home, I wasn’t really excited about the way it looked. But, tonight, that golden light on one of my favorite meadows made me wistful for the high country, as well as letting me look forward to summer. This is a 10-frame panorama of the meadows; I processed each RAW file 3 times, at -2/3, 0, and +1/3 EV then combined them in Photoshop using the blending technique recently described by Younes Bounhar.
I’m pleased with the result; clicking on the image will link you to a larger image file so you can more fully appreciate the detail here! I love panoramas because they really bring you into the scene. Enjoy!
Tuolumne Meadows panorama, Yosemite National Park, California, August 2009
Click here to see all of my Yosemite National Park images.
Really good advice, Greg. I’ve looked at photos right after an outing and had the opposite reaction from what you describe. However, rarely do I delete an image on first review unless it’s got some kind of technical problem that can’t be overcome. Days later I’ll review the photos and it isn’t uncommon to find a pleasant surprise in the lot.
Thanks for linking to Younes’ post, too. Gorgeous pano here. Bring on summer!