Darryl Wattenberg's PhotoBlog

Pontiac Paint

Pontiac Paint
Every once in a great moon I head out to a camera store in Pontiac off Telegraph Road. When I do, I drive back past the corner of Huron and Woodward. Two great old store fronts there scream for photos before they will eventually disappear. The Pontiac Paint & Vanish store is one of those.

Walk, or Don't

Walk, or Don't
While shooting a panorama at the corner of Maple & Bates in Birmingham, Michigan this cross walk light caught my eye. I'm not sure if it was the fact that this is one of the few older non-LED indicators left, or the wasp nest under the hood of the DON'T WALK sign. I would have liked to spend more time on this one, but the snow was starting to really get in the way.

Super Sunday XL in Birmingham

Super Sunday XL in Birmingham
It's not all that often I attempt a panorama, but I'd like to do more of them. Having never done a low-light panorama, I thought this morning might be the perfect chance. Unfortately I seem to have picked up from extra distortion from the 18-35mm f/3.5-4.5 (it was also the first time attempting a pano with that lens). These were all manual exposures as I've done in the past, but each one was four seconds and I used the self-timer to reduce the camera and tripod shake. In all, the total set of images took more than ten minutes to capture. But aside from the changing ambient light that took me about six tries of processing the raw files through PhotoShop, I think this turned out pretty good. This was twenty-four 6.1MP images stitched together using PhotoShop CS2's Photomerge function to yeild a 283.2MB file a little over 87MP with a view a little over 360°.