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Hi Folks: Last day of the month, and that means it’s time for me to sort through the images I’ve made this past month and pick my favourite. I’ve actually started working on a book of photographs (details will surface somewhere down the road when I get closer to my [...] Hi Folks: Well, it’s a little late in the day but it’s still the last day of the month, and time for my ‘Photo of the Month’. Each month I pick my favourite image of the past month, although lately it’s often been more than one image. Most of my work involves landscapes, but sometimes I also stray into macro work. My dedicated macro equipment is in storage at the moment, but I have enough to get me through temporarily. I found two new (to me) species of butterflies this month. The first is an Anise Swallowtail, seen up on the top of Christmas Hill in the Swan Lake/ Christmas Hill Nature Sanctuary. The second is a Lorquin’s Admiral I found at the Oak Bay Native Plant Garden. I trust you’ll enjoy them as much as I do. Continue reading “Photo of the Month – Butterflies“ Hi Folks: It’s the last day of the month, and that means it’s time for me to select my favourite image for this past month. I’m still processing images from April at the moment, so I’m a bit behind; fortunately Lightroom is patient with me. Although I mostly make photographs [...] Hi Folks: I’ve written a couple of posts before on panoramic photography; this one is about an idea, an experiment if you like, that I tried recently. There’s a back story for this experiment, and that is that in the downtown area here there’s a panoramic mural on the side of a building that’s approximately 60 metres/ 200 feet long. It’s a nice work, and I wanted to make a photograph of it. It’s on the side of a building, and that side faces a parking lot. Now most panoramic photographs have one basic thing in common, which is that the location of the camera doesn’t change. If one is using a camera/ lens that’s capable of shifting, then those shifts can be used to capture more image area. Otherwise one rotates the camera to capture each image that is rendered in the panoramic software. I talked about this more in my Photo of the Month article for March. I mostly use Autopano Pro for my panoramas and my HDR work; it works well for me for the most part. I’ve also used Hugin, and more recently I’ve also played a bit with Adobe Photoshop CS5. Continue reading “Stair-Stepping Through a Panoramic Photograph“ Hi Folks: In a previous post I rambled on a bit about panoramic photography – basically a system where one combines several images into one using software designed for that purpose. One can also take several images of the same scene at different exposures and combine them into one HDR image using the same software. Mostly I use Autopano Pro for stitching, although I’ve also used Hugin, and since I work extensively in Lightroom I’ve been playing a bit with Photoshop CS5‘s HDR Pro and panorama tools as well. To create a stitched image the software looks for the same points in two or more images and assigns them as ‘control points’. The combined image is then mapped around those control points. Usually this works very well, but in my previous post I talked a bit about parallax errors and things like that, and sometimes these images don’t get mapped together perfectly. This can create situations like this: Continue reading “Panoramic Photography and Stitching “Errors”“ Hi Folks: I still remember a computer teacher of mine from… let’s just say more than twenty years ago… telling us of a project where he gave everyone in the class several pages of text to type in, set them to it and waited until they were about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way done, then turned off the power to the computer system. Amid the groans of everyone who was sitting in front a terminal he said, “Let’s talk about backups.” Continue reading “Deleting Old Lightroom Backups“ Hi Folks: Well, if you promise not to mention that the ‘photo of the month’ post was due yesterday, I’ll pretend not to notice! At a meeting of our local photography group recently, several people did presentations of images based on a specific theme. Mine was on ‘faces’. I should explain that I’m not a people photographer, and people appear in far less than 5% of my work. I shot a wedding, once, and swore I would never do it again. However, as a landscape photographer one thing I like to do is to look for ‘faces’ and things in other objects. Sometimes they’re fairly obvious and sometimes they’re more elusive. If you go through my Flickr photostream you’ll find a number of such images, but I chose one to highlight as April’s photo of the month. It’s a piece of driftwood I found along the shore on Dallas Road – nearly an entire tree, in fact, and there are some good size rocks embedded into the roots. However, looked at from the bottom of the tree the shape forms a fairly good representation of a human skull. Continue reading “Photo of the Month“ Hi Folks: This is going to be a relatively short post – for me anyway. One of the (many) wonderful things about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is the ability to use presets to speed up your workflow. There are presets for everything from importing to exporting, for slideshows, prints and web galleries (although those are called templates), but for most people, I imagine presets refer to the Develop module presets. Even in the Develop module there are presets for the sliders in the right-side panel and there are separate presets for the adjustment brush/ graduated filter, presets for the Crop tool (specific dimensions) and also for the Camera Calibration tools. Continue reading “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – Playing with Presets“ Hi Folks: Well, since yesterday was the last day of the month this post may be considered an ‘April Fool’s’ joke, but the only fool in this case is me. Besides, yesterday was Wednesday and Marcia’s ‘Poetry Corner‘ post and I didn’t want to compete! Yeah, like that’ll work. Oh well… So. March has been a busy month, photographically speaking. I made close to 2000 images this month, and while there are those who will shoot that and more in a day, I come from a world of 36 and even 12-exposure rolls of film so I’m still not used to the scattergun approach when it comes to imaging. Of those 2000 or so images, many were used as the basis for panoramas, or more specifically stitched images, since not all stitched images are panoramas, nor need be. Continue reading “Photo of the Month“ Hi Folks: This is just a quick idea I came up with last month as I was playing around inside Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. The Clarity Slider is part of the Basic panel in the Develop module, and normally it’s used to increase mid-tone contrast in an image. In Lightroom 2.0 [...] |
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