PhotoWalkPro

Here’s a few things I came across that you might find interesting and maybe inspiring -

Bigger is Better -

How many pixels were in your last image? If you are a select group of Hungarians, the answer just might be 70 billion. With sponsorshop from Epson, Sony, and Microsoft, a group of hungarians have created the largest 360° panorama in the world. I’ve always been fascinated by gigapixel images and this one really takes the cake. You can see the image in all it’s detailed glory here.

Long Distance Dedication -

If there’s one thing I like more than gigapixel images, it’s time-lapse videos. I just find the process of compressing time into a smaller space to be incredibly cool. I’ve been known to make a few time-lapse videos in my time but nothing compares to this incredible walk across America.

Now, if you thought that was cool, check out this “making of” video to see the incredible story of how this amazing project came to be.

Color in Motion -

You might know Julianne Kost as the Adobe Photoshop Evangelist but did you know that she is an incredibly talented photographer and artist? A couple of years ago she released a book called Window Seat, which featured landscape images made from her years of accumulating frequent flyer miles. Some of her recent work though is just downright fascinating. Her series is called Motion Color and after looking at the images, it’s hard not to believe that she didn’t fashion them in Photoshop. The reality is that all of these shots are straight from the camera (except for maybe a little color and exposure tweaking). You can spend a few quality minutes checking out all of her shots by clicking here.

Free Lightroom Learning for Photowalkers -

Did you participate in one of the 1100 photowalks this past weekend? If so then you should have received a personal invite to join Scott Kelby and his cohorts for a little live Lightroom session today. Just click on the link in your email and then log in with the username and password that you created when you registered for the photowalk. The session kicks off at 10:00 AM Eastern time and lasts for about an hour. When you get there, you will get to see Scott and the guys process their photowalk images using Adobe Lightroom. It should be a lot of fun.

That’s it for the day, now go do something inspiring!

I am usually content to create simple pano images using a series of 5 or so overlapping shots all in a straight line. I have always had confidence that the Photomerge function in Photoshop would do a pretty good job of pulling everything together into one seamless image (at least since CS3). But as I was standing at the Cerro de la Cruz above the city of La Antigua, I just didn’t think that I could capture all the detail I wanted by simply shooting a straight pan of images. The problem is that I would have to use a focal length that was pretty wide to capture everything I wanted, from the top of the volcano to the front edge of the city sprawled out below. This meant that I might get some distortion from the lens as well as lesser detail in the final image.

What I decided to do instead was to shoot two series of images panning across the scene; one across the upper portion of the scene to capture the sky, mountains, and volcano, and the other series across the bottom for the city. I also used my 50mm f/1.4 lens on a Nikon D80 so I was getting less coverage (it’s about the equivalent of an 80mm on the DX camera), which meant more shots. In fact I ended up shooting 18 images in total. I was a little fearful that Photoshop would not be able to assemble everything into one seamless image but I threw caution to the wind and made my corrections to the original images in Lightroom 3 and then selected them all and sent them to Photoshop using the Merge to Panorama command.

After Lightroom had processed all of the images, the standard Pano dialog box opened in CS5 and I selected the Auto layout and let it go to town. It took a little while to assemble and merge the 18 RAW image files and then blend them together but when it was done, I was simply amazed with the results. With the exception of some ragged edges, it had pulled all of the images together into one beautiful pano. I simply cropped out most of the uneven edges and then used the Content Aware Fill to fix some of the spots in the sky that were missed by me during shooting and cropping. The result is the image you see below. You can click on it to see a larger version but the actual file is about 440MB, which works out to be about 20×70 inches at 240dpi.

Also, the detail in the final image is fantastic. Here is a small section of the image at 100%.

So the next time you are presented with a wide vista and are thinking of trying your hand at a panorama, don’t necessarily just twist your lens to the wide angle option to get 3 or 4 overlapping shots. Try and push things a little by adding a bunch of narrower angle images and then let Photoshop do it’s thing to really get the detail and size out of your final image.

JPEG has it’s place but if you really want to gain maximum tonal control over your images, you should be shooting with a RAW camera format. So what does this have to do with Ansel Adams, and how do I know he would be a RAW shooter? It’s simple really. Way back in 1939 Ansel Adams came up with something called The Zone System. The object of the system was to produce proper exposure and processing to capture as much of the tonality of a scene as was present when the photographer took the picture. That’s kind of a generalization of the system, especially since there are entire books to explain it. The general principle though was the assigning of luminance values to 11 different zones, with zone 0 being pure black and zone 10, pure white.

Generally speaking, Ansel didn’t care about these two zones because they held no information. It was his belief that the most important zones fell from zone 2, textured black, and zone 8, textured white. By concentrating on these zones, Adams was able to produce striking images with amazing tonal ranges.

How does this relate back to JPEGs? First off, they don’t contain the dynamic range of a RAW file. Once the image is processed in the camera there is no hope of bringing back any values that are black or white. The information is clipped and no amount of post-processing will bring back any texture in them. A RAW file however contains luminance information that can be pulled back in from areas that might at first look like they are clipped through image processing. Let’s take the image below for example.

This is the RAW image out of the camera with no processing applied. The camera meter tried it’s best to balance the bright sky with the shaded canyon. There is some detail but because this is a RAW file I am able to bring back even more.  The mountains at the center of the image are almost completely blown out but by using the Recovery slider in Lightroom I can bring them back into view.

By using the Fill Light Slider, I can bring back the dark, underexposed areas of the canyon, once again because there is detail in the RAW file that is not readily visible.

Some final contrast tweaking and other slight adjustments renders an image that is much different than the initial exposure that came out of the camera.

Had my original image been a JPEG I could have adjusted the exposure to make changes to the tonality but I wouldn’t not have been able to reveal any details that were lost to clipping in the darkest and lightest parts of the image.

If you would like to learn more about applying the Zone System to your photography, check out The Practical Zone System: For Film and Digital Photography by Chris Johnson. And remember, set your camera to capture in RAW, it’s what Ansel would do.

There’s a small vase on my kitchen counter with some really pretty little flowers in it compliments of my Mother-in-Law. I finally got a little time last night to take them down to my basement studio and take a couple of pictures. I had wanted to do some nice natural light shots but my schedule and the sun just refused to line up so I decided to go with a softbox instead.

I started shooting the entire bunch of mixed flowers but after a few minutes I decided to focus on just this one single flower. The colors were so bright and vivid that a white background tended to make the colors look a little muted so instead I went to a solid black background. To do this, I placed a black cloth on my studio table. I removed the flower from the vase and then used a small chip clip underneath the black cloth to hold the flower in place. The chip clip is just a small plastic clip used to close up a potato chip bag after it’s opened.

My lighting setup was pretty simple. I used a softbox as my main light, placed high and to the right of the flower. I then used an umbrella placed to the left at about half the power of the main light and then experimented with the exposure by moving the lights until I was happy with the fill.

I shot in manual mode at 1/125 of a second at f/14 with a Canon 500D Close-Up lens attached to the front of my 70-300mm zoom. The great thing about the close-up filter is that it can be used on a zoom lens so you can really change the framing of the subject without having to move the camera position like you would with a macro lens or extension tubes. The downside is that the close-up lens screws on to the front of the lens so you have to have different sizes if you want to change lenses, or just use it on lenses that all have the same screw-on filter diameter.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the results. Not bad for about 30 minutes of work. Make sure you click on the photos to see a larger view.

A short time back I came across a photo documentary of a teenage soldier. The Denver Post project tells the story of young Ian Fisher, a teenager from Colorado who is searching for manhood and a meaning to his life. Besides the fascinating storyline, the thing that really drew me in was the amazing images from Craig F. Walker, a photojournalist for the Post. Walker’s images chronicled the journey of Fisher as he dealt with family, friends, loves and losses as he went from recruit to soldier in Iraq and everything in between.

If you have some free time this weekend, take a few minutes to be inspired by a truly amazing photographic storyteller. You will quickly see why Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished example of feature photography.

You can see the entire Denver Post feature, including the photographs, videos and more by following this link. It’s nice to see that the art of visual storytelling is alive and well.