We spent a week in Yellowstone in June of 2024. As a wall muralist photographer, I wanted to capture Gibbin Falls in one of my trademark gigapixel style photos. On this particular day, we had travelled around the park to several locations, with Gibbin Falls being the last on our destinations for the day. It had been a blustery day with strong winds most of the day. When we arrived at Gibbin Falls, the wind had subsided somewhat, and a cloud cover had developed, providing great diffused light for shooting a location in a deep canyon.
Targeting to shoot a set of photos that would meet my one gigapixel goal, I chose my 100-400mm zoom lens at 400mm. This, of course, required that I shoot it in focus stacked mode. I used f/16, which is at the very upper limit of this lens due to diffraction. I didn’t want too many frames in the focus bracketed groups because there were still occasional gusts of wind that would interfere with the focus stacking. Using f/16 decreased the number of focus bracketed images for any given position.
As it was, I often had to pause for several seconds as I was shooting to wait for the wind gust to subside. Using my Nodal Ninja panoramic head, I shot a total of 986 frames, all focus bracketed. I ran these images through Helicon Focus Pro to get my set of focus-stacked images. I then stitched them together with PTGui Pro and did final processing in Photoshop. The original finished image is 808 megapixels. 22,124 x 36,532 pixels. A bit short of my one gigapixel goal, but still adequate for a great wall mural.
