On the Klis Fortress

Sunday walk on the Klis fortress, the historic place on the outskirts of Split, Croatia.

When the sun was starting to set, I just couldn’t help but to make panoramas – the view was incredible.
This one is a usual panorama of Split in dusk, short after street lights turned on. It’s always good to have these ‘classics’ in the collection. :)

How to stitch a HDR panorama?

Next panorama was a bit more challenging than the previous one; it is stitched out of 3 horizontal shots and each shot is a HDR blended of 6 exposures. Position and light were beautiful, but I wanted to be sure Photomatix will do a good job, so I’ve chosen to shoot 6 exposures rather than just usual 3, because of very high dynamic range of the scene (direct sunlight).

Why didn’t I shoot vertical images for the panorama? Well, it was not my intention to make panorama in the first place, cause the scene was demanding for stitching; there’s a lot of objects in the front part that needed to be straighten without ruining the geometry of the distant part of the photo – I wasn’t sure about the outcome. But, since I was up there and there was nothing to loose, I took 3 shots just out of curiosity.

Later I wished I did the vertical shots, to have more of the bottom part of the image, but it turned out pretty well anyway :)

Setup: Canon EOS 5D mkII, @ISO 100, f/16, Canon 17-40 @19mm
After blending HDR shots in Photomatix, panorama was stitched in Photoshop, straightened and then processed for colors, contrast, etc…

Photo was taken from the highest spot on the Klis fortress.