This panorama came from a balcony at the Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, NY. The Mountain House sits on the very eastern front of the range, and this view looks to the northwest, into the heart of the Catskill peaks. Given the western view, a sunset shot was a natural choice.
Panoramic photos aren’t “usual;” they don’t correspond to standard print and frame sizes, although I suppose that doesn’t matter as much in the digital age. But still, they require extra effort to capture and composite, and so aren’t as often produced. And to be fair, it takes very little for a panorama composite to fail – a bit too much wind, a bit too little care in the overlapping captures, and it all falls apart.
But I like them, and I like capturing them. They give a better sense of place and mood, a more expansive moment in time.
This was my first time producing a panorama in my post-Adobe software era. I processed the RAW files with the same settings, and then used digiKam to merge them into a single panorama file. I was impressed, both with the ease of the process and the resulting output. The source files had several lens flares across 3 or 4 images spanning the sun, and digiKam did an excellent job of removing those without prompting, leaving just the one flare on the far left. In truth, it was a better compositing experience than I ever had with Adobe, and I’m looking forward to using it again.