The impossible shot ??
This picture doesn’t look like much at first glance but it’s a testimony to how far digital photography has come and how it now surpasses film in many ways and for many purposes.
It came about when I was hurtling home down Inanda Road the other evening and saw a magnificent full moon rising through the skeletal trees on the Camp Orchards Estate. Here was a massive photo opportunity but the conditions were so bad that I had little hope of getting a result.
It was getting dark, blowing a gale, I had a slow f/5.6 lens, I didn’t have a tripod with me and, to cap it all, the moon was rising pretty fast, as it does. I knew I’d need a pretty fast shutter speed to freeze the moon so the only thing to do was to wind the ISO up as far as possible, brace myself against a light pole for the shot, and see what happened.
It was taken at at 125th, f/5.6, ISO3200 and underexposed by 2.67 stops. I’m not kidding myself that the it’s any good, but I am amazed that anything at all was recorded by the sensor.
Worldwide Photowalk
It was Scott Kelby’s third annual Worldwide Photo Walk on 24 July 2010 and I wasted no time in getting my name down for the Durban, South Africa, leg of the walk led by fellow camera club member Andrew Roos.
Our walk took place in Point Precinct Area which includes some of the beachfront and buildings ranging from the ultra-modern to the seriously distressed. The walk started and ended outside Moyo Restaurant at Ushaka Marine World and I noticed that restaurant had established a second instance of itself on the end of the adjacent pier.
I stuck a neutral density ND8 filter on the end of my 18-105mm lens and the 15-second exposure gave a misty effect on the waves that I liked, so I chose the shot as my entry for the Photowalk competition.
All my pictures taken on the walk:
Shooting panoramas
I seem to be doing a fair bit on panoramas lately. One of the first articles I wrote concerned how to shoot them and I wrote that you had to shoot a series of overlapping pictures. The picture below shows what a series of images looked like before and after I had stitched them.
One of the problems with shooting a panorama sequence is remembering months down the line, which images are a pano sequence.Shooting a picture of your hand at either end of the sequence is a tip I picked up on another blog (can’t remember which one) and is a neat way of separating panos from each other, and from other pictures shot on the day.
Fitting it all in
One of the problems of taking pictures of scenery and buildings is that the subjects are often too big to capture in a single exposure.
The problem got even worse with the coming of digital photography because small camera sensors mean that wide angle lenses are effectively not as wide as they would be if you were shooting film.
AutoCollage 2008
The other day I was visiting the Microsoft website and I discovered a couple of interesting little programs including AutoCollage 2008. It is a program which will produce various sizes of blended collages from the pictures in a folder on your computer.
Panoramas yet again…
I’ve been fiddling with panoramas again and came up with this one of Durban’s new Moses Mabhida Stadium on the night Nigeria were playing South Korea in the 2010 Soccer World Cup. We were on the old Mutual Building in the centre of town and looking north to the stadium and, past that, up the coast.
The picture is made up of eight shots stitched in PS CS3.
I have been trying out a number of different packages for creating panoramas and will be posting in the next week about a really cool free option I’ve found.
My previous posts on panoramas can be found here, including hints on how to shoot them.
** More of my stadium pictures here.
Fun with PhotoScape
Last week I downloaded the latest addition of FastStone, my favourite image viewer.
I like it because it is just as fast as its name implies and one of the quickest ways I know of to view a folder of pictures and cull the bad ones. It has a huge range of features including the ability to convert Raw files produced by a whole range of cameras.
It’s free and, if you haven’t done so already, I’d really advise you to pop along to FastStone.org and take a look. When I downloaded the latest version, I also got a list of other programs that FastStone users have downloaded and, at the top of the list, was a free program called PhotoScape, which I’d never heard of. It’s only about 16 MB in size so I snagged a copy and installed that as well.
The PhotoScape editor.
Making bad pictures
I went through a phase of playing lawn bowls but, although I haven’t played for a number of years, I have retained a piece of wisdom imparted by a grizzled veteran. He said that, no matter how good I got, I would still lose far more than I would ever win.
The same thing applies to photography, if you think about it, but there is the difference that your mistakes are preserved so that you can learn from them. Lisa Bettany made the point recently in her Mostly Lisa blog when she went through the photos in her collection and revisited someher mistakes. She has put six of the worst up here, for us all to learn from.
The lesson we should take from all this is that its not bad to make mistakes. What’s bad is not to learn from them…
Lisa is not at all technical but she has a good fresh eye and there’s plenty of inspiration to be had from her pictures. It doesn’t hurt either, that she, in turn, is very easy on the eye. Check her out on her blog and on Flickr.
Aspect ratios
Here’s a quick note on what aspect ratios are and how they apply to planning a screen-based slideshow or presentation. It follows up on my previous post on ProShow Gold 4.1 and explains what I meant when I said that the first step in planning a slideshow is to consider the aspect ratio (or shape) of the screen you are going to show it on.
The aspect ratio describes the shape of a screen (or print for that matter) by stating how many units wide and high it is. A widescreen display is 16 units wide by 9 of the same units high (16:9) or, to put it another way, they are very nearly twice as wide as they are high. You can get big ones and small ones, but they will all have the same basic shape. By contrast, conventionally-shaped computer and television have screens which are 4 units by 3 units high (4:3).
