Sunburst over tulips
At the moment of a Monday April 14th sunrise, the first light of day strikes tulips opening to the light at the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm in Woodburn, Oregon.
This image is also about power. These tulips harness the power of machines like tractors, the power of the rich volcanic soils deposited in the Willamette valley by the Missoula floods, and of course the power of the rising sun.
This is a 3 vertical frame panorama using an 85mm tilt-shift lens and stitched with Photoshop CC.
In Oregon, I prefer to do wide-angle landscapes as panoramas using a telephoto because I feel that wide angle lenses shorter than 50mm make mountains look too small. In my mind, mountains need to be big.
The problem with using a telephoto on a landscape is getting enough depth of field so that near and far objects are all sharp. That's where the tilt function of the 85mm tilt-shift lens helps. The tilt allows you to move the focal plane so that near and far objects can be sharp.
The shift function speeds up creation of the three overlapping frames for the panorama. With the camera set on full manual so that nothing changes between snaps, I usually set the tilt, focus and exposure for the center image and snap it first. Then I slam the shift to the far left for the second frame and finally slam the shift to the far right for the third frame.
Of course, a tilt-shift lens is not required to create a wide-angle telephoto panorama with deep depth of field. Focus stacking and multiple overlapping images certainly can work, but are much more tedious.
