After that I just walked around and went to the Asian Civilisations Museum for the Terracotta Warriors exhibition, where I made the stupid mistake of getting caught up in the other exhibits en route to the Terracotta one. You see, that gallery is buried behind lots of free galleries and I wasn't thinking much when I looked at the exhibits. It was only after a while of "ooh"s and "aah"s that I realised I wasn't looking at Terracotta Warriors. Period. So I rushed over to the exhibit proper, but that is a story for another time.
After that, I walked near the Fullerton Hotel area and it started to drizzle ever so slightly, and the clouds made for a nice view of the sky. And it was then I decided to do a panorama. No tripod, but I just felt like doing it. So I did!
I must first show you guys my first attempts at doing a panorama. For those who don't know how to do it, like me back then, you can find many tutorials on Youtube that are pretty simple to follow.
This was done at Mount Faber some time back in May, and it was done with no prior knowledge of how to actually do a panorama. For one, I wasn't shooting on manual, so you can see the different exposure levels throughout the stitch. Secondly, I was shooting on autofocus, so the focus may be on different zones of the photo (especially since this photo has many layers of "foreground" and "background")
This was a better attempt in that the background is at least more evenly exposed and you can't really tell where the stitches were made, but generally Photoshop does a pretty good job with Photomerge as long as you don't make mistakes that are too obvious like the previous example.
I went to the Marina Bay area with Wei Han in May as well and did two more panoramas. I was really ambitious for this - this was almost a 360degree panorama with the standard kit lens if you notice the Helix Bridge on both ends of the photo. One good technique to note here, besides using full Manual settings and Manual focus, is to take the component shots of the panorama in portrait. This will allow you to take a greater amount of shots for overlapping and also give you a greater depth of view for the panorama.
The Marina Bay panoramas were shot in portrait compared to when I hadn't learnt that lesson; the Mount Faber ones were shot in landscape. However, all these were taken using a tripod, so it was pretty easy to just pan and take everything in.
The clouds were particularly pretty and the sky was really that blue, I even had to lighten it up a bit. Actually, it was stormy and it happening during sunset made it that much more dramatic. A pity I couldn't bring out the full texture in it during post-processing, so if anybody knows how to and teaches me, I will really appreciate it!
The clouds are much nicer here and it looks like they're creeping across the sky. You can even see the raindrop on my lens at the right side of the image. I still can't believe I did this handheld though! I was using a really high ISO to make up for it, but thankfully the quality still looks not bad (haha I didn't pixel peep)
I'm not saying that these panoramas are all fantastic and that awesome, just that I have noticed a significant improvement from when I first started out playing with panoramas using the tips I collected from different websites, so I thought I'd share it with you guys as well!
There's always room for improvement, and putting together what I shot quite some time back with what I am shooting now is always very encouraging =D
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