the Encroachment of Light

I've been taking photos of clouds almost every day for the last two week (minus the smoggy days :P) and I keep telling myself to wait for the perfect shot of the heavens to come along. I figured this one was close enough.

I was greeted by the clouds to the East (in the very far right of the image) when I glanced out my window, but there were too many trees in the way, so I jumped out the window onto the roof. Luckily my parents came home as I saw the view to the North-West (the centre of the image), so my dad tossed me a ladder to get onto the top roof. 8 exposures later and about an hour of combining them, and this is the result.

Thing with panoramas is that you want to shoot in manual everything. Problem is, there is such a ridiculous dynamic range here, you are gonna loose something. Hurray for RAW! I got to keep (almost) everything in the sky. If you ever try something like this make sure you know exactly how your lens tends to vignette, as it will screw you over in the end with big flat areas of colour (such as sky.) Another thing I learned: Shoot panoramas in portrait orientation. You get so much more vertical information. I think this photo would have been much better with another 50% on the height.

I'm just not too sure about the cropping. It doesn't feel very balanced in this incarnation. I looks very left heavy... So I'm almost considering cutting the right 1/3 off. What do people think about that?

edit: I just noticed that there is no EXIF information on this one. Makes sense, I guess. I'm gonna go and try to stick it in now. :P