Know what frustrates me most about this image? I nailed the sky. I love building photos with dramatic skies. And this was exposed darn-near perfectly and adds a very unnecessary flair to this shot. But the image was ruined by the way the building rendered. I count no fewer than four major issues in this photo.
1- On the left, the palms are all blurry. The exposure was too long and I was hand-holding it. Ever heard the axiom garbage in, garbage out? Well, that's incredibly true for stitched photos. Put together thirty bad photos, or even twenty-nine good photos and one bad photo, and you will invariably have a bad photo stitch. That blurryness (and issue we will see again tomorrow) is inexcusable.
2- Next to the blurry image is a random dark spot. That's not due to an overhead cloud, but because one of the images exposed for the sky, not the building, and the photo software had to include it because I only took one shot of that spot. I could have prevented that by doing what I described yesterday: taking a complete set of the building metered for the building, then taking a complete set of the sky metered for the sky.
3- The building looks like it's rounded. This has to do with how the photo software elected to stitch the images. This could be corrected by simply forcing a different stitching method. However, that's not a truly worthwhile effort because of problems 1,2, and 4.
4- I fixed the issue, but on the right side the triangle shapes along the roof appeared to be forming out of a foggy miasma. The photo editing software elected to blend the building and sky. The result was far from pleasing and much closer to ill-making. So I cloned the other triangle forms a few times to rebuild the ones that were blended into the sky.
And, ultimately, why would I want to invest tons of time in fixing the above photo when I have the below one to use instead:
Different perspective. This was from a different angle on the building and lent itself well to the building not appearing to bulge. Also, while I did have to fix one of the roof-line triangles, this image is largely successful. I also had to remove some other photographer's tripod. He was nearer the first photo's location, so I imagine that his photo probably has some ugly bulging, too. Unless he was going the HDR route. Yuck. But he did use a Nikon, which is almost as good as Pentax. Just sayin'.
Anyway, this goes to the last point: if you have an assignment or are just photographing for fun, take multiple images. Don't take one snap and call it quits. Sure, you would from that get some good shots with enough time, but in terms of setting yourself up for success, it's best to take multiple similar shots.
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