With my office only 8 miles from downtown Boston it is really unforgivable that I don’t make frequent trips into town to shoot, yet it rarely happens. I have good intentions but if I don’t wind up working late, I find another excuse to not take the scenic, more productive route home.

That changed on Tuesday when, in spite of working later than I anticipated, I headed into Boston instead of home after I left work.

I knew I was cutting it close. Sunset was less than an hour away and I had no idea what traffic would be like. I could very well have been watching the golden light slip away as I sat on the highway.

I’m happy to report that the traffic gods were with me. I arrived at the Christian Science Center in time to catch the sunset and blue hour.

This is a 17 image, handheld panorama of the Christian Science Center. Handheld only because I had no time to properly set up my tripod. In fact, I didn’t even have time to properly set my camera, which was still set in Aperture Priority mode from a previous shoot (there’s a lesson there).

The original raw images were each shot at slightly different shutter speeds. I visually adjusted the exposure value in Lightroom  before sending them through Photoshop for stitching.

For those interested, I shot this with the Olympus OMD EM1 with the 12-40 Pro Zoom lens at f2.8. All shots were in vertical orientation with about 50% overlap. The 17 shots enabled me to gather enough data to allow me to maintain enough sky and foreground for an adequate crop (16:9).

Processing was done in Lightroom, Photoshop and NIK Color Efex Pro