Geese, Clouds, Camera
I was looking for a viewpoint of Mt. Rainier, but I couldn't get around a storm. Enter the geese.
This is a massive six-panel panorama. The images were obtained by shifting the Sony camera behind a 135mm large-format lens.
These geese (and I think some swans) were hanging out in a low-lying field outside of Orting, WA. I would suppose that the geese-guano is a valuable fertilizer for the spring.
The clouds towered, the geese mingled and tooted, and the swans craned their necks and looked majestic. Perfect photo op. How to take it was the issue; it involved pointing the camera at six parts of the incoming light. Read on for the details.
Technical info: The lens has a huge image circle, which is the illuminated area behind the lens at the focal plane. The Sony is a 35mm camera, so its sensor is 24x35mm. The diagonal is 42.4mm. A lens with an image circle of at least 45mm should be fine to cover that sensor, although the edges of the image circle get a little funky, so let’s say that we’d want a lens with a 50mm image circle to be sure to get good quality in the corners of the sensor.
The 135mm lens I used, a Fujinon CM-W f/5.6, has an image circle 214mm in diameter—way WAY bigger than needed for a 35mm camera. It was typically used with 4x5” film, which is about 100x125mm.
Why would I use a lens like that on a small sensor? It allows me to physically shift the Sony camera left/right and up/down. I did this with the Cambo ACTUS mentioned in the previous post. I carefully focused in the center of the frame, and took two rows of three shots each, displaced +25mm and -25mm from the center, leaving 10mm of overlap for alignment.
The images were combined into a panorama in Affinity Photo. I took a bunch of individual images and several more groups of images for larger panoramas. At some point the geese began to act in a very agitated way, but I was not aware of anything that might have started that. Within about 15 seconds, they took off en masse. I was just quick enough to get a shot of them in the air.
The clouds were changing rapidly—there were multiple thunderstorms in the area, and each of them was on the move and evolving. Not long after the first shot, the storm was towering in the background. The following panorama, made from nine images in three rows, was processed to bring out the details in the clouds, which makes the field look pretty dark.
You can just see the geese at the very bottom. I never did get a clean view of Mt. Rainier, but I had a lot of fun thanks to spotting the geese while I was poking around.
Here’s one last image, which shows how detailed these panoramas actually are. The 3x3 images are 250 mega-pixels, plus or minus. The geese were probably half a mile away, but thanks to the high-resolution of the Sony sensor, I can see the birds very clearly in the viewfinder for focusing. Oh, look—there are some horses, too. :)