Approaching Lujiaowan, panoramic picture for the grand grassland

From the Tien Shan highway, we slowly enter the mountain road moving toward our first destination - Lujiaowan 鹿角湾. Xinjiang, presented in front of us is different life style, sheeps, horses, cows, oxes, yaks, deers and endless grand grassland.

This image is taken by using Nikon D3X, with AF-S VR 70-200/2.8G IF-ED setting at 86mm, close down to f/9, 1/100s, ISO 100. To exhibit the largeness of the grassland, I took 8 individual captures and stitch them for this final artwork 39,001 pixels wide, 4,198 pixels height. Few tips, since I was shooting RAW, the WB setting does not matter, but if one is shooting JPEG, make sure the WB is manually set, so is the focus, and manual exposure, forget about the CP-L or graduate ND in most cases. Today’s stitching software is very powerful, I am using Capture One Pro 4.8.1 to develop the Nikon NEF file, export full size JPEG and stitch them in Photoshop CS4 or RealViz when I also need to export the QTVR file. It is suggested if you can mount the camera/lens on a tripod or VR drive and make sure the camera/lens is leveled. You can also free hand shooting, just to make sure you have adequate overlapping area between each capture. Why do I use Capture One or export the file in JPEG will be covered later in separate section.