Busch Stadium Panorama

I figured for my first post I would show you one of my favorites. This panorama is not only the biggest project I have undertaken, it was also my first real attempt to create a large photograph I wanted to print.

Originally, the inspiration behind this photograph was my Grandparents. They were both lifelong Cardinals fans and loved St. Louis and Busch Stadium. This was one of the last seasons the 'old' Busch Stadium was going to be used, as they were going to be building a 'new' Busch Stadium right next door, so I thought I would create a large photograph for them to have to remember Busch Stadium and all the years they went to watch the Cardinals play.

One day in the fall of 2005 after class, I was sitting at my computer looking through some photos I had taken the previous summer when the whole family got together in St. Louis for some baseball. I had quite a few shots of the entire stadium from our outfield seats and wondered if I could combine them to make a large panorama of the entire stadium. At this point, I was relatively new to Photoshop, so I started playing around with it, getting moderately good results. I continued to play with, tweak, move, and stretch six to twelve different photographs until I had a pretty decent view of the entire stadium from left to right.

When I took the original photos I don't think I had planned to put them together to form one grand panorama, so there were some missing areas, most notably, the extreme corner of right field (bottom left of this photo) and large portions of the deep outfield. I was also still relatively new to my Canon 20D DSLR, so not all of the exposures I was working with were the same. This made things a bit more difficult as colors didn't quite match from photo to photo. Additionally, the portions of the picture that I had to create manually were dependent on the existing photos. If I didn't get the places where each photo merged right, the whole thing would look off. I also wanted to have a 2:1 ratio of width to height. I figured this would look better. In addition to the outfield areas, I also had to extend the sky upwards some to achieve this ratio.

After innumerable hours working on this project (I was in college afterall, what else would I do, study??) I finally created something I was happy with. Unfortunately neither of my Grandparents were able to see my completed work while they were alive, but I'm sure they've seen it.



As I sit here looking at this I am overcome with the urge to go back and edit it a little more. I would like to bring out some of the sky a bit more; add a little more 'pop' to the picture.

I am also overcome with a feeling that the 'new' Busch Stadium can't hold a candle to the real Busch Stadium. This stadium was unique; it had character. Sure it needed some upgrades, but overall it was a classic stadium. I've been to the 'new' Busch Stadium, and to me it is just another MLB stadium built in the 2000's. Not much is unique about it; sure it's nice, but it doesn't have the character that Busch Stadium had. It's just another new stadium in a sea of new stadiums. Thank goodness Kansas City decided to renovate Kauffman Stadium instead of building a new one.