Ken Duncan Takes the LX3 to New Heights

Iconic Australian photographer Ken Duncan recently completed a trip to Queenstown, New Zealand. Armed with his trusty Lumix LX3 he set out to capture the beauty of the mountainous landscape.

Known internationally as Australia’s premier panoramic landscape photographer, Ken was the perfect man for photographing New Zealand’s expansive snow-capped peaks and valleys. The following is how Ken described his experience along with the steps he took to achieve the right shot.
We had just finished our Lumix Academy in Queenstown, NZ where I had spent time with some of Australia’s best sales ambassadors for Lumix Cameras. It was a fun time. We were all about to head home to Australia when the chance came up for me and a few of my friends to take a quick helicopter trip to an amazing photography location before heading home.

We were not dressed for snow conditions but when adventure calls you must take the opportunity. So off we headed to this awesome location on Cecil Peak offering breathtaking views of the Remarkables, Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu. When we stepped out of the Helicopter my slip on shoes were not the best and they got filled with snow but who cares.

All I had with me was my trusty LX3 Lumix so I quickly did a Stitch Pano. To do this I set my camera to Manual and manual focus.

I was shooting in the RAW setting so I did not need to set white balance as I set this latter by batch processing all the images for stitching in Adobe Raw converter. If you do not have a RAW setting on your camera then you would need to set the white Balance, do not have it on AWB Auto White Balance.

To do the Stitch I did it in the Portrait mode as this gives you more depth in your finished image. The Panorama was made from twelve images and I allowed about a 25% overlap in images for stitching.

This image is about 240% in angle so this method opens up a lot of options for us. I also find shooting from left to right the best way to go for stitching. The camera was set on its wide angle setting which I thought would never work but it really does as you can see.

To stitch the image I used Photoshop CS4, using Photo merge and using Cylindrical mode. This image is just a small Jpeg of the original image which is over 520mb. Now that makes a big file size that will allow you to do some big prints. This file can easily print up to about 1.5 Metres. So this just goes to show what you can do with a small camera.

I hope this has proved helpful to you and if you’d like to stay in touch and receive more tips please join the Lumix community I curate on Flickr. It is a great place to share your Lumix photos with other passionate photographers, I know I’ll be uploading mine!

Happy Stitching

Ken Duncan