Tag: panorama

Navajo Highway

Posted on by Nick Roberts

This image is from Arizona along the road out of Flagstaf heading east. I was taken by the alien looking landscape and decided to stop and shoot a few frames before heading east. I climbed up on one of the mounds of clay to get a better composition and to get a sense of the place.

This image is almost straight from the camera. I used a polarizer to cut down on reflected glare. The composition uses the rule of thirds as well as letting the highway become a leading line. All processing for this photo was done in Aperture 3.

I Love Making Panoramas

Posted on by Nick Roberts

I really like shooting panoramas. I’m President of the Louisville Photographic Society which has been in existence since 1941. One of the reasons for the club’s longevity is that each month there is a member competition which fosters a level of commitment to continual improvement by the members. Each year the board meets and decides on the categories for each year’s competition. We try to evenly split the categories between camera skills and subject matter so that our members learn new skills or explore areas that they may have never tried before.

For me the competition category of Panoramas was one of those areas that I hadn’t pursued until challenged by the club competition. I started studying how to shoot them and in so doing I fell in love with the process.

For the shots in this post I shot 5 frames at approximately 30 degrees apart. I also shot 5 frames at each position so that I could produce HDR frames before merging them in Photoshop CS5. I liked the process so much that it has become second nature to me when I see a scene that would benefit from being shot in panorama.

Though both of these final panoramas were shot on the same evening they have completely different overall feels. I shot the top one just after the sun had slipped below the horizon which captured the warmth and fantastic color of sunset. When composing this shot I wanted to get as many of the Ohio River bridges in the frame as possible.

The second image was taken a few minutes later after the sky had begun to cool down and the sun was much further below the horizon which made for a much cooler overall feel to the scene. I use a free iPhone app “Darkness” which tells me when sunset occurs as well as when dusk occurs. Since using this app I’ve learned that there is nearly a full hour after sunset when there is still enough light in the sky to produce good images.

It goes without saying that I use a tripod since I’m shooting HDR as well as Panorama but another key factor in getting these images to work is that I shoot at a low ISO. On my Nikon D90; ISO 200 is the setting I use. I always shoot in RAW because the amount of data in the image is so much larger than is possible with Jpeg.

My processing for these images was to merge them in Photoshop CS5 and save them as TIFF files. After that I took them into NIK HDR Efex Pro for Tone Mapping etc. Then they went back to Aperture 3 for final sharpening and output.

Salt Flat Storm Panorama

Posted on by Nick Roberts

The weather on the Salt Flats can change pretty quickly. This storm moved in early in the day with 60 mph winds, rain and lightning. We had to take down our EZ-Ups and get off the Salt Flats because the storm was going to be very intense. I was on my bike and I wanted to get back to my hotel before it hit but I couldn’t resist stopping and shooting the storm as it rolled in. The wind was rocking me back and I had to put the face shield on my helmet down due to the salt that was being carried on the wind. I got the three shots for this panorama before it got too close for comfort and then I got on my bike and headed for town.

I stitched the three images together in Photoshop CS5 to create the panorama.  After that I took the image into NIK HDR Efex Pro where I used the Realistic (Strong)  preset before returning the image to Aperture for final sharpening and color adjustment.

Ohio River Bridges Panorama

Posted on by Nick Roberts

Image 

Today’s shot is stitched together from two frames I shot from Waterfront Park. I used Photoshop CS5 to stitch them together and then finished the image in NIK HDR Efex Pro. I like the way the silhouettes of the bridges give structure to the scene.

I like shooting panoramas because they allow me to include so much more of the scene than one image usually can accomplish. Panoramas take a little more time to setup and shoot but the end results are almost always greater than I could accomplish by simply cropping into a single image to produce the panorama format. 

Flaming Sky

Posted on by Nick Roberts

Today’s image was taken at Louisville’s Waterfront Park. I love the texture that the clouds produce and the silhouettes of the bridges. It is a single image that was processed in NIK HDR Efex Pro and finished in Aperture 3.

I love Louisville’s Waterfront Park and the way the bridges across the Ohio frame my shots there. On this particular evening I was able to place the sun between two piers on the left side of the Kennedy Bridge which added to the drama of the scene.

I believe a photographer needs to shoot every day; in the same way that a great musician practices every day to better control his instument. The more one uses the tools of his craft, the better artist he becomes. Photographing daily allows me to become more and more skilled at composition and using the controls of my camera.