Wa-Hoo-Wa!!

(Click on any image to see a larger view)

 

What do you do when you’re in Charlottesville on a fall weekend and the University of Virginia (UVA) Cavaliers are playing a home game? You go to the game! That’s what I did yesterday. My daughter, a third-year student at UVA, and I saw the Cavaliers play their rival Hokies from Virginia Tech. Unfortunately, for Wahoo nation it hasn’t been a very good year and they finished their season with a loss to the Hokies.

Since I was going to the game, I decided to bring the camera along and try my hand at doing some of those panoramic shots you see from a lot of sporting events. To start with, I should point out that when doing panoramic shots, your results would be better (higher resolution and overall better detail) if you shoot vertical shots vs. horizontal shots. I won’t bore you by posting all six of the vertical shots I did but this is one of them.

 

I made sure, while holding the camera steady, to start at the left side of the view that I wanted and then I rotated to my right, making sure there was at least a 25% (eyeballed) overlap of each image. It took me six shots to get the angle of view I wanted. I used my wide-angle zoom lens for this and it was set at approximately 18mm.

 

Once back to my computer, I brought the six files into Photoshop and used the Photomerge option to stitch the six images together to form one image. There are other photo editing tools out there that will stitch together images for panoramas, I use Photoshop because that’s what I’m most familiar with. Once Photoshop was finished with the stitching, I did a little tweaking to the contrast, lighting and sharpening to finish the image that you see here. One additional thing I could have done was to crop the photo to make it look more like a panoramic view. But, I didn’t want to lose a lot of the sky and foreground so I left it as is.

 

Next time you’re in Charlottesville, go check out the Wahoos in action. Hopefully, you’ll get to sing the Good Old Song and do the “Wa-hoo-wa” yell.

I welcome your comments and/or questions about this post or anything photo related!!

Posted on December 1, 2013 .