On my way to Christmas Dinner I stopped by the Papago Park Amphitheater to capture some of the most dramatic skies of 2019. Also the start to a long chill for Phoenicians use to 70-80 °F weather. If you haven’t seen it is just south of McDowell Rd between 52nd St. and 64th St.
The first version is how Photoshop rendered it using Camera RAW. It does a great job, minus some lighting issues. I didn’t get the focus perfect either as this was just going to be a project to test Photoshop’s accuracy. Focused images do help with alignment though. As far as finding that middle ground for capturing light, I went with what my I learned in my first year of photography classes. On a cloudy day use F8 at 1/250ths of a second at 100 Iso.
The second image below is what I did stitching the image together using a few different methods. I made sure to use lens correction before placing each image. Then used Auto-Align to save a ton of time. I was able to delete some pieces and heal the seams using layer masks and finally the patch tool. The differences are subtle. The little things I see are the wind blurring bushes and maintaining the same focal distance for each image.
The main idea is when I do pack up my car to go on an adventure I will arrive with knowledge of what’s working and what isn’t. Then I can work more efficiently as the chaotic skies roll over head.
