It’s beautiful up here!

 

If you have some extra time and are out on that stretch of I-40 where the little rock drills are hanging (cabled from cranes) off the top of the rock face drilling and pinning mesh stuff to try to slow down the rock slides Max Patch isn’t very far from there.

 

Thereis  landscape eye candy in every direction, the Unakas to the north, the Great Smokies to the south, and the Great Balsams and Black Mountains to the southeast.

 

At 4629 feet elevation Some of the trees still hadn’t finished unfolding their leaves yet.

 

 

 

The views are worth the trip.

 

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I did it, I finally made one of these little planets.

 

I took a bunch of pictures all around me from standing in one spot.

 

Stitched them together in Photoshop to make one panoramic image.

Next I watched this guy’s video on how to make your own little world. I don’t know what he did in Lightroom so I just skipped to the part about what to do once you have a panoramic image. He explained it as he went along, not those annoying ones with just music.

 

So I followed his steps and came up with this! What? Cool, I guess but I wanted my own little world.

 

I hit play again and at the very end he explained you just turn your panoramic image that you just stretched into a distorted square upside down before you go to Filter> distort> polar coordinates.

And there it was a little planet that looks like it’s having a bad hair day!

 

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The best thing about breaking my wide angle lens is I can’t get much of a panoramic photo or more like can’t get any. Actually that’s not the best thing at all.

 

 

Because of this I was motivated to learn how to stitch photos together. I wait to learn things until I really need to. Maybe it sticks better in my brain that way.

 

Or maybe it was because I heard someone say they’d stitched a bunch of photos together to make one image, and they have a super awesome fancy pants camera and in the back of my mind I had this thought that went somethin’ like this:

I may not have a super awesome fancy pants camera but that doesn’t mean I can’t stitch photos together anyway.

 

  Super awesome fancy pants camera people are some of the friendliest people I’ve met and more than willing to share what they know.  The Three Amigos  here were  shooting with their  super awesome fancy pants cameras  from my favorite spot and were more than happy to answer all of my questions. That one in the middle is some kind of camera I’ve never heard of before that takes 80mb files! It’s cool though, He’s a Habs fan watched ‘em at the Forum.

 

   

 

I don’t know if I did it the most efficient way and I’m sure there are many other ways to do it, but  this is how I stitched 4 photos.

I used Photoshop but I ‘m sure you can do it in Gimp too.

Open all photos you want to stitch and then open a new blank image (File >Open >New.)

Make it large enough to fit all your photos you want to stitch.

Drag in each photo onto the blank image and line it up as best you can. As you line them up temporarily adjust the opacity of the layer to 75% so you can see the layer it’s over lapping. If you kept the camera level as you took all your photos this job will be a lot easier.

Don’t ask me how I know.

 

Then comes the fun part! Select all layers then tell it to align layers (Edit > Auto-align layers…)  Then just sit back and wait for the magic. I used a light eraser on the edges of the layers that overlapped. 

 

If you’re like me and shot without a polarizing filter because you didn’t yet realize how important that was, it might look a little dull and wanting just a little something more.

 

I tried a vibrancy layer at 15%

and a curves layer, the auto preset to “increase contrast”. Then I set the opacity to 56% because 100% was too much.

Saved it as a jpeg and that was it.

1. To see the shades of morning.

 

2. To see the sun before it rises.

 

3. To walk out into fields and not care how wet the dew is.  

 

4. To have wet shoes and pants before 7am. 

 

5.  To try an HDR image.  

 

6. To take 4 pictures and learn how to stitch them together to make a panoramic.  

 

7. To Realize  that there are Two deer not just one right behind you and all the cars that stopped are not stopping to look at you and think you are cool just because you didn’t hit snooze at some ridicules hour this morning.   

 

8. To be wide awake and have the rest of the day in front of you. 

 

9. To just smile and say this world is a beautiful place.

 

Ten? Nope, there’s just 9 today. I got up early.