Haley and I spent this Saturday in Northern Washington picking apples. It's becoming somewhat of a tradition (as much as you can call it for a couple who's lived here for a bit over a year now) for us to go up to Jones Creek farm and peruse the literally thousands of apple trees found there for that perfectly crisp, sweet, and slightly tart specimen.
After we had finished picking apples, I noticed the moon rising over the hills surrounding us. I walked a quarter mile or so to a spot unobscured by the large hedgerows that separated individual's farmland from one another. Once I arrived, I started shooting like mad, knowing the moon would quickly move out of position.
I knew that I wanted the compressed perspective offered by a long lens, so I chose to take several dozen shots and stitch them later in post, rather than just using a wider angle lens. This made the apparent size of the moon much larger while also creating the illusion that the foreground was much closer in relation to the hills than it actually was. Of course, stitching something like this is a pain in the butt, so I ended up recreating large swaths of sky by hand in post, due to the impossibilities of getting control points on featureless blue sky.
The original pano was 108 shots @ 190mm, but I cropped a large portion out of the center for compositional reasons. If I had gone with the whole thing, the final file size would be around a gigapixel, making it my largest yet :). As it stands, this version is 420 megapixels.
