I photographed this small wharf at Thurston’s Lobster Pound in Bernard, Maine on September 12, 2016, 17:56, while teaching a panorama workshop. The wharf was in shade while the sun was hitting the boats in Bass Harbor in the background.

I wanted a selective focus on the buoys and ropes with the lobster traps and harbor providing a blurry backdrop and plenty of negative space on the wharf in front of the pile of buoys to blur as well, like a tilt/shift lens effect.

It’s about a 48mm field of view, so I could have shot it with a 45mm f/2.8 tilt/shift lens, but I didn’t have one with me. Instead, I used my 70-200mm f/2.8 at 200mm, f/2.8, ISO 64, 1/160, focused on the buoy I wanted to be the sharpest, chose the corners of my scene, and shot a bokehrama of 7 columns and 6 rows. I rotated every 5° and tilted every 5° for plenty of overlap, because the focus distance was only 29 feet away and the blurred out foreground was even closer.

I then aligned all the images with PTGui Pro and blended them with Photoshop. The finished panorama is a little over 630 megapixels and can easily be printed 10 x 7 feet with excellent image quality.

Camera settings: 200mm, f/2.8, ISO 64, 1/160.

Stitching data: 6 rows of 7 images for a total of 42 images.

Equipment used: Nikon D810, Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR II, Really Right Stuff TVC-34L tripod & pano/gimbal head. RAW conversion to 16-bit TIFF via Lightroom, aligned via PTGui Pro, and blended in Photoshop.