Rockface
Another deepzoom image 
You can say, I like to make panorama’s.
The trouble with tea estates is that there is too much green wherever you look and it is difficult to see good photo opportunity. Especially when you are walking about with a 35mm lens. So I resorted to looking at wide vistas and given I knew I could stitch images and get a good shot, I decided to go for it and shot numerous sequences to be stitched.
Back to this image, the nice 400-500 ft Rock face look very enticing if you are a rock climber and if there had been an op, I would have tried my hands (and legs) at climbing. But the reality is that climbing this rockface is exclusive to the local Irula Tribes (the natives of Nilgiri mountains). They climb this often to get hold of bee hives and harvest honey. You cannot see beehives in this shot but just to the right were a few nicely developed bee colonies ripe for harvest and the locals climb with improvised creeper / rope ladders.
Technical details for those interested:
- Shot using D200 with 35mm f/2.0 AIS lens.
- Stitched with a really cool panorama stitching tool (hugin).
- 5 images shot from bottom to top.
- Some minor adjustments made with lightroom to match exposure and white-balance. Hugin has options to match exposures when you process the images for stitching, I decided to match them manually when pre-processing though.
- One of the shots turned to be slightly out of focus, you will see when you zoom deep in.
- About 12 MB jpeg file made into a deepzoom object using free deepzoom creation tool from Microsoft.
On a separate note, hugin allows a lot of control on stitching the panorama and though a bit more tedious than using photoshop elements, I prefer the output from hugin.
Enjoy exploring.
May 7th, 2009 13:04
Nice pics Nat. What is the weather like there? Is this rockface a little higher up in altitude? The greens are really green.
May 7th, 2009 19:59
The greens are a bit underexposed and hence look very saturated. Well, the picture does not do much justice to the place.
The valley we were in was in the Nilgiris, altitude should have been about 2000m. Not too high by nice enough to have a pleaant weather. Days were cost and night should have been between 15-18 def C. Being on the west face, the monsoon does not affect the place too badly. In toto, a nice little place to kick back and enjoy the nature.
It also helped that the resident cook was amazing