Stormy Night Approaching

Published June 9, 2011 | By Bill

My wife said, “Come look at the sky; the colors are weird.”

As the sun was setting the evening of Wednesday, June 8, 2011 a storm front was moving in. Of course, I grabbed my camera. With a little digital magic I was able to capture the dramatic transition from peaceful sunset to stormy night.

My camera (Sony SLT-A55) has a mode it calls “Sweep Panorama” that stitches multiple photos together to make a larger image. I used it and got a nice image…but it wasn’t large enough to capture what was really happening. I could get some of the dark, angry clouds or some of the calmer sunset – but not both. The lens and photo frame were not large enough to fit the early evening drama in the same image.

In order to capture the full scene I wanted, I took five separate photos and stitched them together on my computer with a handy, free program from Microsoft called Image Composite Editor, or ICE.

As I said, this image is the composite of five individual shots. The final, combined image was over 100 mega pixels. And, as if that weren’t large enough, I actually tried to join 17 different individual photos together, but the final image turned out bent and distorted.

Here’s another view of the sky that evening.