A Story of Canon EOS R6 with a Photographer. Let’s explore this in detail.
Luigi is one of the most active participants on our Facebook page dedicated to Landscape and Nature: what we show you is one of the latest shots he published and selected by us for the Greenpics column.
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Born in 1968, and professional since 2000 with a studio in Bagheria (PA), Luigi Parisi is a landscape photographer by passion. With his friend Gaetano he then planned, at the end of December, an excursion to Mount Mufara, a peak at about 1,850m above sea level included in the short mountain ridge known as Madonie, in the northern part of Sicily. Usually in winter, you can ski here, but this year there is no trace of snow.
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At the end of the ascent, short but tiring due to a load of equipment, Luigi finds himself in front of spectacular scenery, with excellent visibility that allows you to admire the volcano Etna, located about 85km as the crow flies to the east (visible on the left side of the image, with a snow cap).
Canon EOS R6: The Instrumentation
Luigi then quickly chose the shooting point, a few meters from the new and not yet active astronomical observatory, positioning his old and trusty aluminum Manfrotto 055 with a three-movement head on a level. The camera used is a full-frame mirrorless Canon EOS R6 on which Luigi has mounted a universal 7artisans 9mm f/5.6 lens. It is a super wide-angle camera made in China, with a huge angle of view (132° on the diagonal), with manual focus and aperture, without electronic contacts, but with good optical quality and above all an attractive price: on the manufacturer’s website it costs less than 480 dollars, net of postage and any customs duties.
The Shooting Technique
The image you see doesn’t cover exactly 360°, but it’s close: to respect the 2:1 ratio between the sides, Luigi has excluded a small portion corresponding to the northeast quadrant. The vision, however spectacular, was obtained by combining six vertical shots, each of which is the result of a three-frame bracketing to increase the dynamic range and make both shadows and highlights legible.
So, for each position, Luigi set the camera to ISO 50 to minimize noise and took three shots with a closed aperture at f/8 and shutter speeds of 1/125sec, 1/30sec, and 1/8 of a second. Bracketing has also made it safe in the face of the physiological reduction of the dynamic range towards the highlights that occurs using a sensitivity lower than the nominal sensitivity of the sensor (ISO 100 in the case of the Canon EOS R6).
the pin marker, and Mount Etna in the background.
With Photoshop, Luigi then combined each trio of shots to obtain six HDRs, and to avoid brightness inconsistencies he always used the arithmetic averaging blending tool.
The final six elements were then fed to a very effective and free program, but available only for the Windows platform: it is the AutoPano Giga software, easily available on the net.
The panoramic file generated by AutoPano was then optimized again in Photoshop, with a series of interventions aimed at composition, contrast, and sharpness, without forgetting the fusion with the image that captures its hiking companion, an element that helps the observer to attribute the right proportions to the majestic landscape.
