First blended panorama

I’m continuing my attempts to learn manual blending of images. This time I went with a manually blended panorama from 4 sets of 6 brackets. Didn’t even take so long to blend, just the final touches took a long time :)

Most asked questions

I get asked a lot of questions about my photos, and they are usually the same :) So here are my replies to most asked ones :)

How do you edit your photos?

I mostly use HDR tonemapping using Photomatix and finish up my photos in Photoshop and Lightroom. Check out my HDR tutorial to see the details

Where did you take that photo?

To see the (almost) exact location for all my photos added this year, just find the relevant post on this blog. Under each photo you can find the location on Google maps. If you click on the Google logo, it will open a new window with Google maps and that location centered.

What camera and gear do you use?

I currently use a 5D mark II. For the complete list of my gear, check out the My gear page.

What were your settings with this photo?

If you want to know what were the settings, just find the relevant post, open it and under the photo is a list of all the camera settings. Or you can go to my smugmug portfolio, and there if you hover over a photo, you get a Photo information button. Click on it and all the relevant exif data is shown.

How many brackets do you take?

Simple answer, as many as I need :) But usually it is 7, that’s my default value :)

Earth vs. the Flying Saucer

Looks almost like a view from an UFO, invading Bratislava :) Actually it is a view from a restaurant called UFO :) This is another of my experiments with manual blending. Here I used two images, which were combined using masks in Photoshop, with some additional steps done after that (contrast, noise reduction, sharpening). For the comparison, here are the two original shots, that I used:

and here is the final result

My largest photo yet

I went a little bigger here :) It was more of a test than anything else, just to try out how to edit a photo like this. This photo is 200Mpix big, around 18000×10500 pixels :) It was created from 85 photos, 17 sets of 5 shot brackets (should be 18, but I missed one, good that it only was on the sky, so I could correct it). The composition here is a little off, still can’t really visualize how a panorama will look after stitching, still need more practice :)
Photos tonemmaped in Photomatix, then merged in PTgui.

Check out the small photo on the right, it is a 100% crop from it :)

Article on composition

I wrote an article about photography composition for the HDR one magazine. It’s a collection of rules you can follow to get better photos. For those interested, it can be found here.

Panorama from Rocky Mountain Lake

I had a panoramic head for some time, but haven’t used it that much. But as I bought a new PC recently, I finally have a computer that is able to handle images of this size. For instance this one is stitched from 9 photos for a total 70 megapixels in size. This is one of the panoramic shots I took at the Rocky Mountain lake in High Tatras. I went there during Christmas for a little trip :)

Photo usage

It was not a nice day today, as again I was forced to post a copyright claim with Facebook. A page (which I refuse to link to) again posted my photos. 11 of them this time. All with their own logo, without mentioning my name or saying that they are not the owners. And this is after I complained yesterday about them using one of my photos like this and Facebook already taking it down. Really not nice…

So just to reiterate. All my photos are shared under Creative Commons licence. That means you can: share my photo for any noncommercial purpose, as long as you mention that I’m the author of the photo and link back to this page but you can’t: use my photos for commercial purposes without acquiring a licence from me or modify my photos in any way (including your logo is a modification)

If you just post a photo to your personal account or use it as a cover on Facebook, and don’t mention me, that fine (it’s nicer if you do, but I will survive if you don’t :)). But adding a logo to them and pretending they are yours is a theft and will be handled accordingly.

Mountains

A lot of Slovakia is covered by very beautiful mountains. And Lomnicky Peak is one of the highest ones here. Great that you can get up using a cable car :) It was fun to take photos there, as every time I set up for a shot, the wind came and blown in clouds into the shot. So I set up somewhere else the wind came again and I had to move again. And just waiting until it gets better was also not an option, as the entry is only for 50 minutes :)