This image, I suppose, could be called a labor of love.

Ok: 9 shots with a 50mm lens on Pentax *istD at f/22 using an infrared filter. Shooting infrared is tricky as it is, but trying to shoot an infrared pano can almost drive you insane. First you need bright lighting conditions to get good IR reflection of the foliage. And, you need to go at a time of day when the sun will not peek into the far edge of your pano when shooting the pictures so as not to get ugly flare, and to maximize the IR light the sensor picks up. And, you need to get a day when the wind is at a minimum...because when shooting at f/22 with an IR filter you will obviously be on a tripod taking long exposures, and if there's wind it blurs the leaves quite a bit. I went back to this spot four separate times over the course of a month to try and get this right.

After that, numerous hours of post production, correcting the stitching, straightening the horizon, adjusting the perspective, balancing the colors and contrasts... When shooting digital infrared, the color generated by the camera is actually a "false color" since the CCD sensor has to assign some sort of visible color to the IR data it's seeing. It can produce some interesting results, especially when tweaked. What I actually did was process the image twice, doing two separate color mixings: one as it came out of the camera with standard level adjustments, and then another where I switched color channels to change the color of the sky and some more subtle tones in the foreground. Then I layered the parts of the two images over each other. And considering each image had a file size of several hundred megabytes in 16 bit color mode, you can guess that it was grueling on my system.... If nothing else it's reconfirmed my desire for one of those new 64 bit Athlon processors....

I know weird infrared "colors" don't appeal to everyone's taste, so sorry to those who don't like it Plus, sorry for the big file size...I wanted to make it even bigger because you loose so much of the detail (the physical print size is 12 by 29-1/2 inches!), but I guess computer screens just aren't set up to display panos. Anyways, perhaps too much rambling here but it's a relief to be able to do so after finally finishing it. If you made it through this far, thanks