Telstra Clear Pacifica Centre

TelstraClear, originally uploaded by nzcjs.

There's a few interesting objects close to Manukau City's Telstra Clear Pacifica Centre. One of these objects is the large Maori carving. This is the tallest in the world and is quite impressive. The problem is that to get it all in without seeing the traffic on the motorway, electricity pylons or other modern day artifacts means you need a wide angle lens, but then the carving curves due to the lens's focal length. Furthermore, the stone carvings either side of the main carving are often missed.

The answer was a stitch! Five images were taken with an 18mm lens on a 1.5 crop factor DX format digital camera then stitched with Hugin software. This software is VERY impressive and worth investigating.

After playing around in Hugin I imported the resultant composite image (weighing in, believe it or not, at just over 800MB) to Adobe Lightroom. I cropped the image, then saved three TIFF images at -2, 0 and +2 EV to import into Photomatix Pro. Even before I arrived at Telstra Clear I was taken with the clouds and I thought I'd get a bit more drama into the image with a bit of HDR. the end result is as you see. Do you like it? Comments are welcome :-)