Christmas Lights by cameronknowlton

I finally received my panoramic gimble tripod head, so I thought I'd try it on something familiar first. Victoria's inner harbour is always beautiful, day or night, but it gets particularly stunning during the Christmas holidays. This year in particular added all the new [faux] Christmas trees all through the harbour... how many can you spot?

This is my first response to Cheryl's Get Pushed Challenge Week 21 challenge over at 365Project.org, which was to "show me in photos what the Holiday Season means to you".

This night time long exposure panoramic is composed of 8 images, each shot for 30 seconds at f/22, ISO 400 on my Nikon D600. The images were brought into Lightroom, to clean up their white balance and reduce their hightlights and vibrancy. I stitched the 8 exposures together in Hugin, then returned the pano to Lightroom for final exposure adjustments.

I shot the images with my Nikorr 105mm f/2.8 lens; next time, I'll use a wider lens, as I had to take a full 24 exposures for a full 360 degree panorama (not shown here); the 50mm would have done it in 1/2 that, and gotten in more height to take in all of the hotel that got clipped (not included in this panorama).

However, the quality of the 50mm just doesn't touch that of my 105mm. This would better be served by Nikon's 16-35mm f/4, or by the 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6 that I have my eye on.