This is a crop of a 360° spherical panorama of Maine’s Bold Coast between Cutler and Lubec on September 6, 2013, 12:52 – 14:08. I used a 10-stop neutral density filter at f/22 to get long 30 second shutter speeds during the day of the ocean’s surf on the rocks. It was incredibly windy so I wasn’t sure if it would come out at all when I shot it. It took an hour and sixteen minutes at 50mm to capture all of the images with a Panoneed robotic head and Promote Control. The Panoneed has gyroscopes and a vibration sensor to only take photos when it is still, and on a Really Right Stuff TVC-34L tripod and leveling base it is very stable and vibration resistant.

I shot three brackets spaced 1.7 EV apart to cover the entire dynamic range so the sun’s reflection wouldn’t be too blown out. The panorama was stitched with PTGui Pro, but some of the sky was done row by row and images individually placed by hand, then masked in as layers manually in Photoshop to correct for the sun and cloud movement over such a long period of time between rows.

Camera settings: 50mm, f/22, ISO 200, and 3 exposures of 5 sec, 13 sec, and 30 sec.

Stitching data: 75 positions x 3 brackets for a total of 225 photos.

Equipment used: Nikon D700, Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8, B+W 10-stop ND filter, Promote Control, Panoneed robotic panning head, and Really Right Stuff TVC-34L tripod w/ leveling base. RAW conversion to 16-bit TIFF via Lightroom, aligned via PTGui Pro, and blended in Photoshop.