My wife and I arrived in the Olympic National Park area earlier in the day. Once we had set up the RV at the park, we drove up Hurricane Ridge, hoping to capture a sunset shot before a predicted rainstorm arrived in the late evening. Known for its high winds, Hurricane Ridge was surprisingly calm upon our arrival, with hardly a breeze. However, clouds were already beginning to form on the western slopes of the mountains, making it seem likely that the cloud bank would ruin our chances for a sunset shot.
As sunset approached, the sun moved far enough north to avoid the cloud bank, and it began to shine brightly, casting beautiful light on the golden grasses of Hurricane Ridge. I could see that there would be some stunning sunset colors in the clouds.
As a wall mural photographer, I always use a panoramic nodal head for my shots. One of my goals is to capture the largest possible image at each location. I set up my tripod with the Nodal Ninja M2 panoramic head and mounted my camera with a 100-400mm lens, choosing 300mm as my focal length. I noticed a significant range of light, with the right side near the sun much brighter than the dark valleys. To account for this, I employed ETR (Expose to the Right) and adjusted my shutter speed to allow for about 2-1/3 stops of overexposure in the brightest areas of the scene.
Since I was shooting at 300mm, I also needed to shoot focus-bracketed images of the foreground to ensure everything in the scene would be tack sharp. I realized that the golden grasses in the foreground would lose direct sunlight first as the sun set, so I began my panoramic series at the bottom left of the scene, shooting row by row upward, finishing the top row at the top right. This resulted in a set of 6 rows and 30 columns. PhotoPills predicted sunset around 7:29 PM, but I expected we would lose sunlight much earlier. It typically takes me about 10-15 minutes to capture a panorama of this size, so I started shooting at about 6:50 PM, expecting to finish around 7:05 PM.
I completed my shooting exactly at 7:00 PM, just as the sun was providing beautiful golden light on the cloud formation on the far right side of the scene, illuminating the skyline with lovely pink and golden hues.
To finalize the image, I first preprocessed it using Adobe Camera RAW to make initial adjustments and convert the files to TIFF format. Then, I used Helicon Focus Pro to focus-stack the bracketed images; the top row was not focus-bracketed. Final stitching was accomplished using PTGui, followed by post-processing in Photoshop. The finished original full-sized image measures 33,934 x 110,241 pixels, totalling 3.74 gigapixels, and is 2.87m x 9.33m (113 inches x 367 inches).
