Creating a Photo: Back to New York with British Airways – Part 11 – The Photo

Creating a Photo: Back to New York with British Airways – Part 11 – The Photo
Featuring the British Airways Airbus A318E.
Or – “World. Enough now. Stop it. Please. Pretty Please…”

• The Introduction
• To London
  
• BA 1 – London City Airport – Shannon – New York JFK
• One Time Exception: Apple Store, Grand Central Terminal
  
• Holiday Inn Long Island City Manhattan View
• A trip to a camera shop
• Time with Friends  and back to JFK
  
• JFK T7, Pre-Flight Dining
  
• BA4 – New York JFK – London City Airport
• Radisson Edwardian and the Trip Home
• The wrap up
• The Photo

As the trip went along, I went from one disaster to another, with the plan for a night photo in Times Square going down the pan thank to the dirty sensor. Thankfully, the day before that royal pain – I did shoot something completely different that would make a great photo – a Panorama

From the 16th floor suite I was in I spend a fair amount of time shooting the pictures to this to get the image I wanted. As I had no tripod, this would be done the very old fashioned way – a very steady hand.

And this was a simple, if slow sweep across the area I wanted, and made a few attempts to get some nice panoramas.

With a straight import from the camera, I got the collection of images I wanted to play with, and after checking for no major mistakes in the images, I exported the batch of photos from Adobe Lightroom at full size to get a nice large set of working pictures to make the panorama.

The images in Lightroom – no adjustments made

This generates 15 images for me to work with.

A batch of images – ripe for stitching

For the next bit of work, I need to switch to Windows to do this dirty work  – for those of you on a Mac, this is a switch to BootCamp, VMWare,  Parallels or Virtual Box (take your pick). Providing you’ve mapped everything up correctly a lovely Windows desktop will appear (I’m using XP as I like something lightweight for this work).

To create the big panorama, I’m using a free bit of software called Microsoft Image Composition Engine  or Microsoft ICE

Free for Windows 32bit or 64bit – have a download and a play

Once installed (Requires .NET Framework 4.0 as well as a variety of other bits), and loaded, you’ll get something like this:

Hit Cntl+N (or File > New) and select the photos you want to work with… then watch the magic happen…

For those on less powerful computers, or manipulating big data sets, get a cup of coffee.

And after a short wait, you should get something that looks like this:

Well – I coud had shot that a bit better. As you can see I wasn’t straight all the way through the pan. Thankfully, hit automatic crop… and a lot of the dirty work is done for you

So the image is ready, coming in at  a small 15094  by 4388 pixels – or 66.23 megapixels.

Small image really… 😉

With that image in the state it’s in, it’s time to hit export, add a watermark, and then put it on a site to for all to see.

Long Island and Manhattan Sunset Panorama – (c) Kevin Marshall 2012.
Image licensed for personal use ONLY. PLEASE DON’T REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION.

You can download a 5mb version of the panorama here

Eventually (when I hit the lotto or when I get a few hours) this will be a canvas to hang somewhere in the flat. For now, it’s an electronic bit of art that I hope you like.

Thanks for reading 🙂