Three Frames, Nine Exposures

To make this panorama image, I shot nine photographs with my Nikon D610 camera and Tokina 16-28 mm f/2.8 lens. Photograph/Umesh Dandekar

I made this HDR image on 29th March, 2015, a cloudy evening in the metropolitan city of Mumbai. I found this precise location to capture the symmetry of the BMC building along with the orange sky and CST station placed on the right. I had realised that placing the building symmetrically behind the underground passage would look good.

While shooting, I realised that if I set my camera exposure correctly for the sky, the BMC building would look underexposed. On the other hand, the sky would look blown out if the structure’s exposure would be correct. Therefore, I decided to capture all details in a single frame using the HDR process.

I had pre-visualised the image as a HDR panorama shot. Therefore, I had to shoot three different angles at three different exposures simultaneously.

For this process, I decided my central shot first. After shooting from that angle thrice, I made six images from the other two angles. I ensured a 40-50% overlap with the central shot which made it simpler for me to stitch the photograph later, using Adobe Photoshop CC. —Umesh Dandekar