What to do during the cold Winter days when it is too cold to go out hunting for photo opps? Stay home where it is nice and warm and play with images you aready have. This is an image I first took in the fall of '06. The original had a very distinct 'face', but not enough to be anything special. I just spent some time with it to hilight the facial features a bit more with some burning/dodging, contrast curves and yes, I cheated and 'photoshopped' it a bit by overlaying a real face photo as a darkness mask.
I named this image 'Ent' based on the tree creatures from the Lord of the Rings books
Panoramas
Photography
Wednesday, 18 November 2009 18:02
I've been playing a bit again with panoramas. It is amazingly simple to shoot images for a simple panorama with any digital camera.
The workflow I've found that works the best is:
Shoot images in any format/size. A tripod helps, but I've done several handheld.
Use Photoshop to adjust/resize the images.
Photoshop has panorama features built in, but I think a free program called 'hugin' does a better job.http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
I'm displaying the 360 degree panoramas online with a very old java program from a company called MGI that doesn't exist anymore. I think they were bought out. But as long as the program still works, it does just what I need it to do with just a few clicks.
Some of the panoramas may take several seconds to load, since the files can be quite large.
So enjoy these links to a few panoramas.
Note: Panoramas will open in a new window. Close that window to return to this page.
Walter called to say that he had a fox den on his property with at least 5 pups living in it, so I headed down with the camera and 400mm lense. The light wasn't the best, so we were shooting at 1000 ISO (hence the grain). I got over 350 shots that day, of which only a dozen really came out, mostly due to low shutter speed or tricky focus through the underbrush. It was great fun though, and I'm glad I got a few good pics to show for it.
Timelapse, Bike ride start
Photography
Friday, 22 May 2009 23:38
Another timelapse. This time I used manual exposure and light balance to get rid of the flicker as things change automatically between exposures. This is an exposure ever 4 seconds, stretched by 40% when rendered in HD. For best results, watch it in HD on the Vimeo site and click on the 'full screen' icon in the lower left of the preview window before playing.
