lemaire – Kevin Raber

Any long time reader here knows that Antarctica is my favorite place. I have been there over 20 times and do a trip or two a year. We were lucky to get the trip this year in February before everything shut down. One of the favorite locations in Antarctica to experience is the Lemaire channel. This a narrow channel between two large mountains is a highlight of Antarctica travel. On a trip a few years ago I did a 30 exposure pano of the channel showing both ends. as the ship was moving forward I set up my camera in a vertical position and turned the drive to low. I then set my first exposure at the end of the channel from where we began and then panned right while the camera was on auto-drive. This made a lot of exposures to blend but assured I would have enough for good overlaps and creating the pano. The pano was made in photoshop. I think this a unique image of a popular location, thus accomplishing what I always like to do is finding a different way to see something that so many people photograph.

I really enjoy doing panorama photos. Not only do they make large files that I can print large but they also allow a viewer to see a lot more in an image than a traditional single shot frame does. There are a lot of photographers that make a big point out of doing perfect panoramas using special rigs and aligning the nodel points to perfection. While I do that sometimes most of the time I just don’t the gear or the time. As a matter of fact a lot of time I can really good panos just by panning the camera handheld. And, that’s exactly what I did with this image. I was on a moving ship traveling through the Lemaire Channel. It’s a most amazing place in Antarctica and while you can get great single frame images I saw an opportunity and thought I’d give it a shot by doing a handheld pano while the ship was moving. The water was calm and the sunrise was just happening. A gorgeous, moment is the only way to describe it. So I did two series of pans and one turned out. Photoshop where I did the stitching together of the images, was brilliant at compensating for the movement of the ship and thus this is the image I ended up with. The channel can be seen from one end to the other.

Tag: lemaire

Lemaire Channel Pano

Lemaire Channel – One End To The Other