Hey people, what's new?
Yes, my first new post since the website went live. Pretty exciting stuff.
And speaking of exciting stuff, looky looky at the eye candy I've brought you. Two images from a recent jaunt up South Mountain.
Click here to see where I was when I took these.First is this panoramic view of Phoenix, with the West Valley to the left, 7th Avenue straight up the middle, and Sky Harbor Airport peeking from behind the ridge on the right.
For those of you interested in how this image was created, gather 'round. Most important in this case was my tripod [
The first accessory every photographer should buy.] That's because the exposure was so long--six seconds--and no one can hand-hold for six seconds without major blurring. I wanted sharp little city lights, not blurry smears. Even with the tripod, you can see that parts of the image have little tails on the lights, slight shaking of the camera and its large lens from that evening's brisk gusts of wind.
With camera attached, I tweaked the tripod with the goal of making the tripod head (where the camera attaches) as level as possible. This will maximize your image area and cut down on the digital processing. There can be too much of a good thing.
About this same time I took a wider angle picture with another lens, roughly in the middle of the sky's transition from light to dark. The aim here is to get an exposure setting that won't make the East side to dark, or the West side too light, while balancing the light of the sky with the city lights. Huh? To make it easy on myself I had been taking pictures of this scene every few minutes for some time, waiting until that balance I sought showed up on my screen.
With a fine tuned exposure, I set those values (f 8.0 @ 6 s) into the camera's manual mode. This way the exposures should all come out like I expect. Incidentally, my ISO (the camera's light sensitivity) is set to its lowest, ISO 100. This may seem counterintuitive, given that it's quite dark, and we're resorting to tripods to minimize shake. You should know, though, that the higher the ISO setting on any particular camera, the more noise will be present in the image. Noise? Noise you can see? Sure. It appears as grainy details (light noise) and strange, mottled colors in the shadows (color noise.) Getting the best final print is easier if you start with the best quality you can get out of your camera.
I focused on the middle distance, and turned off the auto focus. Again, this ensures the focus is the same for every image. Now we're ready to take pictures! Lots of pictures.... When I shoot a panorama, I like to overlap images by a third to a half. Basically each landmark will appear in about three consecutive images. Also, I turn the camera 90 degrees so the images are portrait orientation (taller than they are wide.) When creating a single-row panorama, I find it convenient to define the height of my view this way, and just keep shooting images from one end to the other. In this case it took 34 images to encompass the valley bookended by the ridges at each end.
That's it for the field work. The rest takes place in the computer. In this case I used the Merge to Panorama feature available in Photoshop CS3. I've used a few pano merging programs, and most of them have needed more or less (mostly more) fiddling to line up images and blend exposures. The image you see here was the first try, using the Auto setting. I'm impressed. Finally, I adjusted contrast, color saturation, and some other things to perk it up.
I'll be back shortly with another image from this trip. Talk amongst yourselves.
-RW
