We were visiting our friends at their beach house on the west shore of Lake Tahoe for the week. On the first day of our stay, they took us to see the sights along the shores of Lake Tahoe. This was one of the locations they showed us. A short hike from the road revealed that this spot had great potential for a sunrise photo. Using my PhotoPills app on my phone, I could see that the sun would rise directly behind the two trees, allowing for a shot with the sun shining through them onto the tiny waterfall. In my mind’s eye, I could imagine the water droplets of the waterfall glistening in the golden light of the morning sun. I told my friend that I really needed to return to this location for a sunrise photo. Unfortunately, the next two mornings were rainy. Three days later, we got up early and went to this spot for the shot. With virtually no wind, I was able to capture this scene using focus stacking in a 12 ft. by 21 ft. mural, exactly as I had envisioned three days earlier.
With the rapidly changing light of the sunrise, I had to work quite quickly. I used a Nodal Ninja M2 nodal head mounted on my tripod. Since I wanted to capture a fairly wide field, I chose a moderate focal length of 200mm for this shot. As with any mural shot, I always aim to create a mural that will be at least 1 Gigapixel or larger. With a 200mm focal length, focus bracketing was necessary to ensure all the close-up objects were in focus. I selected f/11 as my aperture to minimize the number of focus-bracketed images needed. Processing was done using Adobe Camera RAW to make initial adjustments to the images and export them as TIF files. I then used Helicon Focus Pro to focus stack the images. PTGui Pro was used to stitch the images together. Final processing was completed in Photoshop.
With virtually no wind, I was able to capture this scene in a 12 ft. by 21 ft. (3.66 m x 6.4 m) mural. This panorama consists of 192 individual 45-megapixel focus-stacked images derived from 3,567 focus-bracketed images. The finished image is 3.419 Gigapixels, measuring 43,857X77,968 pixels in size.
