My Day-to-Night in one Picture

I thought that I would try to do a ‘day-to-night’ panorama in the style of Krzywinski. (see my post of 13^th March). But I didn’t have easy access to great photo positions overlooking a city. So I decided to shoot a wide building at ground level with windows that light up as darkness falls. I chose a large house with a conservatory, but the rear garden was steeply sloping, so the camera angle was quite steep. I couldn’t get the house in one shot even with a wide-angle lens, so I did it in three shots, with the idea that I would use the Photoshop panorama tool to join up the three shots.

I started to take pictures late afternoon (4 pm early March) with a strong, low sun lighting up the bushes and a palm in the garden. As it started to get dark, the lights in the house were turned on in all the rooms at the rear of the house. I took a set of pictures every 10 minutes until it was getting quite dark (6.40pm). I had 16 sets of 3 pictures.

The idea was to create 16 panoramas and then slice up each panorama into 16 sections. One slice would be taken from each panorama to make a new day-to-night panorama.  Slice 1 would be from panorama 1 (sunlit) and slice 16 would be from panorama 16 (night).  I started to do this but the results were looking rather odd and Photoshop wasn’t so good at joining the slices up. I realised that what would look better would be something much simpler – three time segments that covered the three sections of the house.  The right hand side of the house would be in daylight, the central part at dusk and the left hand side at night. So I selected the appropriate shots from the 16 sets of pictures (shot 1 picture set 1, shot 2 picture set 9 & shot 3 picture set 16) and joined with the panorama tool. I made some adjustments with the transform tool to allow a little for the steepness of the camera angle and the crop tool to give me a neat-edged picture. I did some minor cut-and-paste edits and it was done. Well I hope you managed to follow all that! The result is shown below.

I may still do a bit of work on the right hand side of the picture to improve the distorted (by camera angle and Photoshop panorama tool) horizontals. The window top , gutter line and roof line might look better if they were parallel.

Now what I have noticed in the other day-to-night pictures that I have seen, is that time goes from left to right in the picture. Mine goes from right to left. Does this matter, does this feel odd? What do you think? Answers to my blog please.

Camera:

Olympus E-410 DSLR, 14mm lens (28mm, 35mm equivalent), tripod mounted.

Set at ISO 100. Night pic: 1.6 sec at f3.5. Dusk pic: 1/10 sec at f3.5. Daylight pic: 1/125 sec at f6.3.