While walking around the woods adjacent to Cootes Paradise (part of the conservation area land managed by the Royal Botanical Gardens also referred to locally as the RBG) in downtown Hamilton, Ontario I found a spot with a view across a small bay near Cockpit Island and along the Princess Point Trail. It had snowed the night before but it was a wet, sloppy snow and began melting as soon as it was deposited. Looking across the small bay, the leaves remaining on the trees, combined with the glimpses of the snowfall covering the ground, struck me as appearing to be like a mosaic. – JW
Date Taken: 2018-11-16
Tech Details:
This is a 3-image panorama made using free Open Source Hugin panorama software.
Three overlapping mages were taken using a tripod-mounted Nikon D7100 fitted with an AF-P DX Nikkor 70-300mm 1:4.5-6.3 lense set to 185mm, Daylight WB, ISO100, Aperture priority mode, f/6.3, 1/50 sec with an EV+0.67 exposure bias. PP in GIMP form Nikon SOOC JPEG file (I like it enough not to bother with processing from the Nikon RAW/NEF source file): load the image as 2 layers, top layer fro adjusting the leaves and the bottom layer for adjusting the background, add a black/transparent layer mask to the top/leaf layer in the bottom/background layer use select by colour and sample a typical leaf colour, copy the selection and paste it onto the top/leaf layer mask, use the threshold tool to turn the greys in the mask to white and yield a good clean adjustment area mask for the leaves, on each of the layers use the tone curve tool to get a good tonal range for the respective components of the image, also do some saturation and contrast adjustment to the leaf layer, create a new working layer from the visible result, do some fine tuning of contrast and brightness, sharpen, save, add fine black-and-white frame, add bar and text on left, save, scale image to 2048 wide for posting online, sharpen slightly, save.
