I have been in Toronto Canada for an extended period of time this year. One of the iconic views of the city is the downtown skyline taken from the Toronto Islands that form a crescent around the downtown harbor front about 1/4 – 1/2 mile offshore into Lake Ontario. Ferries leave the harbor front area and travel on a short trip to 3 locations on the island chain. The CN Tower which dominates the skyline profile is the world’s tallest tower and easily identifies the city. The second well known structure is the Toronto Skydome, home to the AL’s Toronto Blue Jays and the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts.
This evening’s trip to the islands will be my first attempt at doing a stitched panorama – taking multiple images spaced across a horizontal (or vertical) scene and then merging the images together with software.
I had the basics rehearsed as I set up but had not set out to do this style of photography before. Remembering to level the tripod and head, set the camera exposure and focus to manual, fixed white balance, establish a base exposure, using a remote trigger for stability, overlap exposures by 20 – 40% depending on the shape changes the software can detect during the alignment process. My tripod head is a basic ball head without any separate panning capability. So in order to pan, I rotated the center column of the tripod manually. Given the distance the skyline was away from me without any discernible foreground elements I did not worry about placing the nodal point at the center of horizontal panning (something I plan to address when I add a panning head to my camera bag).
The resulting 9 image pano above worked out well. I am pleased with the result of my first stitched panorama. After packing up my gear and heading to the ferry ride back to the mainland, I became aware because of the ferry’s route that there were better positions to shoot from to include the city’s recognizable SkyDome. In the image above it is tucked away behind a number of the numerous new city front condominium towers that have been erected over the last decade or so. I realize that I need to return to another location to do this all over again.