Practice panorama

As I said yesterday, I was curious about how a gigapixel pano would look like. So just for fun (and practice), I tried to take one from the balcony of my apartment. I almost got it. The result was around 800Mpix. Funny how quickly one learns about file format limits when one tries to save something like this. jpg can’t be over 30 000 pixels wide (ok, it can, but Photoshop will not open it), tif can’t be over 2gb in file size and so on :)

Missing snow

Yesterday I went out again to shoot, as the snow was falling. And that was exactly what I wanted, a photo with the castle with falling snow. But for the second time this week, as I got to the location I wanted, the snowing stopped. So I ended up with few blue hour shots, and will have to try again next time.

This is a 5 exposure HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine and finished in Photoshop.

For today I edited one of the biggest photos I ever took. It’s from last year, but it quite fits, as there is also some snow now in Bratislava. As you can see, the color changes from left to right. This is due to how the blue hour changed into night as I was taking the photos. At first I though I would correct for that, but once I combined the shots, I liked the result more like this.

This photo was created from 10 photos, each one from 5 exposures (so 50 photos in total). The resulting photo is 26000×5600 pixels big, so around 145Mpix. I would probably continued to edit it a little further, but my PC was a little overwhelmed with the amount of data. Even the saved file from Photoshop is over 6gb :)

As this is a little wide view, here is a little zoomed version

And one that is 100% zoomed in.

PhotoME

Did you ever had the need to change the meta data info off an image? I had. Especially when I create panoramas from multiple exposures and somehow one of the images gets a wrong exposure time (e.g. 15 seconds instead of 16 second) and the panorama program refuses to recognize the series as HDR because of that.

I searched for a program to correct this problem, and I found this one. PhotoME. It’s small, easy to use, and best of all it’s free. So if you have such need, to edit this info in your photos, give it a try.

You can download it from their page: www.photome.de

33 minutes

That’s exactly how much time you see in this photo. As I mentioned by my other star trails photo, I managed to get two photos that evening, and this is the second one. Fro this one I had to combine 66 thirty second shots so it took 33 minutes to take this photo. The clouds were also moving, but luckily around 10 minutes in, they sky got completely clear. Also there was a slight movement in the water, so it blurred the reflection a little.

All the 66 shots were combined using Photoshop.

Free wallpapers

If you are looking for a new wallpaper for you desktop, why not check out my wallpapers page? You can find it here.

Free copy of Onone Perfect Effects 8

I quite randomly came across this link. On this Onone special offer page, you can get a free copy of Onone Perfect Effects. Just go there and click on Get Started. Enter your name and email address and you will receive and email with the download link and the serial number. If the page does not load, just try to reload it few times. It’s probably that the server is under a very heavy load now :)

And hurry if you want it, the offer expires tomorrow.

Sun in the night sky

It would probably look even more like a sun if I retouched the lamp post away, but still, it looks a little like it :). We gout our first real snow this year, so I went out to take few photos. But unluckily, for what I wanted to try, I needed it to continue snowing, but it stopped exactly as I got to this place. Maybe next time. So instead I played with the composition here.

For this photo, I took one 30s exposure at F22 to get the nice star effect, and then blended it with another series of brackets at F5.6 from which I blended in the darker parts. It a little bit yellow, but that’s what it really looked like :)

Using Magic Lantern

Magic lantern can make taking photos so much easier. Not only when you are shooting HDR, but also for long exposures and when you need to use the intervalometer. So great to have it directly in the camera, and have no need for a special remote. It even removes the 30s limit, when you are bracketing. These really should be made standard on all cameras :). You can see more about Magic Lantern in my review of it.

The moving sky

Finally yesterday, after weeks, we had a clear sky in Bratislava. So I, with a fellow photographer Pedro Kin, went out to try and grab some star trail photos. Not even the -10 degrees stooped us. It’s funny that two hours of shooting just got me 2 finished photos to use. This is btw. my very first star trail photo I did, and I’m actually quite pleased on how it turned out :)

This photo is created from 46 exposures, each one 30s long at F2.8 and Iso 800, blended all in Photoshop. I used the Magic Lantern intervalometer function to take all the exposures. The trees in the foreground were lightened in one exposure, as we had to move the car.