Copperopolis is a town in the foothills of the Sierras, east of San Francisco. Yes, there were once copper mines in Copperopolis. As we were driving east approaching the town border, we were presented with a nice cloud formation. I took two frames with a Nikon P6000 pocket camera, with the intention of making a spliced vertical panorama.

The source frames show the exposure problem. When the sky is reasonably exposed, the foreground is reduced to featureless shadow. When the foreground is reasonably exposed, the sky blanks out in overexposure. The tricks is to take two frames that overlap very near the horizon. When a Photomerge™ panorama is made, both the sky and foreground detail are retained. The merge was the “reposition only” option, and I increased the color saturation and contrast a little after the merge.

The main purpose of making the merged panorama was to solve the exposure problem, but having a larger field of view was helpful as well. Even though I cropped out much of the uninteresting foreground, the merged image turned out to be about 20 megapixels. You can’t have too many pixels.

I had waited until there was no traffic so that there wouldn’t be a problem with merging images with a car in two locations. I use to try to avoid having a road in landscapes at all, but now I’m more inclined to include roads. A road sometimes adds to the sense of being at the place of the photo.