San Francisco

From atop the park in Bernal Heights.

Click the image above to download the 28MB JPG file – 12,500 pixels wide.
Click the downloaded image to enlarge.

May take a while to download, depending on the speed of your broadband connection.

There was no choice. On a fabulous cool, haze free day Bernal Heights beckoned as the sweeping views from the park afford simultaneous views of the Golden Gate Bridge, far left and the Oakland Bay Bridge, far right. Eat your heart out, Noo Yawk. From this vantage point the Transamerica pyramid is hidden behind the Bank of America tower. The panorama subtends an angle of view of approximately 180 degrees – half a circle.

7 image hand held panorama stitched in Photoshop, the combined PSD file from the RAW originals is over 600MB in size. I allowed lots of overlap between the images and the use of a distortion free medium length lens made the job easy for Photoshop to do perfectly first time.

Panasonic GX7, 45mm Zuiko, 1/8000 @ f/6.3, using manual exposure to keep the sky density constant. I cranked the ISO up to allow use of the shortest shutter speed and the optimum aperture for the superb Olympus Zuiko lens on the no less estimable Panasonic GX7. A touch of noise reduction was applied in Lightroom. If you had told me a decade ago that this sort of quality was possible with a pocketable, hand held camera I would have recommended a quick trip to your local loony bin.