This panorama came from the same shoot as the last post and was stitched together from 6 shots.  One of my main problems with panoramas is that things get very wide very fast and they are really hard to view.  To get a little more height, I usually shoot them with my camera in the vertical position to make things a bit taller.  You could shoot them in two rows and stitch them all back together, but that increases the difficulty a good bit.  I also like to use a decent amount of zoom or a longer-length lens.  Wide angle is fun and can be necessary if you are very close to your subject, but the edges of the frame are often distorted, which matters when you’re joining a lot of shots together.  Click for the larger image.  I used the regular size that I always post here – no larger than 1024 pixels wide, but the original is over 17,000 pixels wide!  If anyone is really interested in seeing a higher-quality version, leave me a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

UPDATE: 2010.03.11 – these panoramas really require a larger view than my standard pics do.  Click the image above to see the updated, 250% larger version!

Stereotypical Seattle Panorama is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

If the view looks familiar, it’s because Kerry Park is one of the very few places you can shoot this view from, so the idea is hardly unique, but I was still excited to go up there for myself and see what it was all about.  I did a bunch of panoramas too, so you might see some of those coming up.   I like this a lot in HDR, but there is some ghosting – it’s a really busy picture and there are a lot of lines that will show any mis-alignment.  I shot this on a tripod with a cable release, but it’s still not as sharp as I’d like.  I guess there is a reason that my tripod was $80 instead of $500.

Standing up in the park on a cold morning made me think a little more about what it means to make a picture like this.  Sometimes all it takes is a lot of luck and showing up to get exactly what you want, but the real pros put far more work in than you might think.  I wanted sunrise, so I got up early.  I wanted an interesting sky so I waited for some clouds but not too many.  I wanted the sun between the Needle and Mt. Rainier, but when I got there I realized it was coming up much too far to the north – if you want that shot, you need to come back in a whole different season.  Like I said, sometimes you might get lucky, but most of the time it doesn’t just happen!

Stereotypical Seattle is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

This morning I jumped out on the balcony all bright and early, just for you.  Yes you.  First, let’s go whole hog: Camera set to Av (aperture priority), I cranked out three bracketed shots (-2, 0, +2) of the sunrise.  I then use Photomatix Pro (which I said I don’t use) to combine them into a Tone Mapped HDR.  I’m using Photomatix here because Photoshop kinda chokes on this kind of thing and I wanted a comparable image.  Behold the magic picture below, in all its funny HDR glory.

You wanna hear the rest of the story?  Hit the jump.

So what if you only had the “regular” exposure shot of the three used to create the picture above?  Well here is what you gotta do.  RAW images save all of the data the camera had when it took the picture, instead of doing some processing in an attempt to make the best picture in camera.  This is super handy for getting your white balance right, but it’s also pretty good for changing your exposure.  Open the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw or your RAW editor of choice.  Tweak any settings you feel like, but then set exposure to -2 and save a copy.  Do it twice more at 0 and +2.  Now you have three identical pictures with different exposures.  If you combine these in Photoshop it will bitch at you, but it will also kinda mangle things, hence the goofy (but fun) Photomatix.  It is probably going to choke too – it knows these are the same picture, so it’s going to need you to manually specify which one is -2, which is 0, and which is +2.  No problem, right?  Combine into an HDR and then Tone Map them.  I didn’t twiddle any settings, just so you could see the difference:

So what do you think?  Obviously the colors are a bit different, there is less richness in the Pseudo-HDR, and the most obvious difference, it kinda blows up the gradient in the sky pretty good.  However, it looks like an HDR, right?  You know the alignment is going to be good (very nice if you’re taking pictures of the water or something moving at speed) and you didn’t have to bracket (which also means you probably didn’t need a tripod).   If you already shoot in RAW, it’s a good thing to know.  If you don’t shoot in RAW, you might want to remember this if you think you might want to fake yourself an HDR for fame and fortune.

Pseudo-HDR: Half-Assing Your Way To Fame And Fortune is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures