HDRshooter

France, Paris

A spring moment under the Eiffel tower

January 27, 2018 No Comments

A spring moment under the Eiffel tower

I hope you all have a great weekend. I spending mine doing an early spring clean up of my flat :) And while I was doing that, I though I would also share a spring photo with you. So here is one, from early Spring in Paris. The weather was horrible that day, but about for one hour, it got so beautiful, with nice blue sky and golden sunlight everywhere. So of course I was not the only one there. And while I usually don’t like people in my photos, I liked this scene as a whole, so I decided to include them.

This is a two shot vertorama, combined in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop.

Austria, Plotagraph

Traunsee reflection – plotagraph

January 26, 2018 No Comments

Traunsee reflection – plotagraph

No new photo today, but a new plotagraph. This one is from the Traunsee in Austria, from a photo I shared about a week ago. If you want to see all the plotagraphs on the blog, just head over to the Plotagraph category. As always, you can find a drop-down menu with all the categories at the bottom of every page.

You can check out my Plotagraph Pro review here, and a guide how to create them here.

(if you use an older web browser, you may only see a static image, if you are on a mobile, please hit the play button to see the Plotagraph in motion)

Bratislava, Slovakia

Panorama across the bridge

January 25, 2018 No Comments

New albums in my portfolio

If you visited my portfolio page under www.hdrshooter.net, you may have noticed that all photos there are in one huge gallery. But as I was cleaning my photos recently, I had to split them base on countries on my PC locally. And once it was done, it was easy to do so also in the portfolio. So now you can head here www.hdrshooter.net/Albums and see galleries that only include my photos taken in a specific country.

Panorama across the bridge

It’s not that easy to take night photo on the SNP bridge. Actually it’s not easy from any busy bridge. The passing cars create quite a lot of shaking and vibrations. So one need a bit of luck or patience, to wait for a moment where there are fewer cars. Not always happens :)

For this shot, I wanted the top and bottom to frame the castle. I partially succeeded. I did not have a panoramic head with me, so I could not use a wider lens to do this panorama. Still, I really like how the walkway pulls your view across the image from left to right, so making you look across the whole photos.

This is a two shot panorama, with a third shot used to darken the light of the walkway a bit. Combined in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop.

Articles, Guides

How to remove lens flares

January 24, 2018 No Comments

How to remove lens flares

I mentioned lens flares in my yesterdays first impressions of the Laowa 12mm lens post, and that they are also quite easy to remove. So today I have for you a short video on how to do it. If you prefer a more elaborate written explanation, head over to my How to remove lens flares tutorial here.

How to remove lens flares in Photoshop

If you want to follow along with the video, you can download the two used images from here. Also please excuse the bit worse sound quality, don’t have my microphone right now, just a webcam.

Articles, Reviews

LAOWA 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D lens – first impressions

January 23, 2018 2 Comments

LAOWA 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D lens – first impressions

I mentioned few days ago that I ordered a new lens, the LAOWA 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D from Venus Optics. And since the seller was very quick on delivery, I just got it today. And of course I immediately went out to try it out, and here I will share with you some of my fist impressions and fist photos I took. You can also get a full RAW file from one of the shot at the end of this post, so you can see the results of this lens for yourself.

Specifications

The LAOWA 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D lens is a ultra wide angle lens with very small barrel distortion. It’s a fully metal build lens, that is completely manual. Here are the specsifications of it to be exact:

Focal length: 12mm, Aperture: 2.8 to 22, Angle of view: 121.96 degrees, Aperture Blades: 7, Weight: 609g.

A great thing, if you use filters is, that with either the Laowa or the Nisi filter holders designed for this lens, you can use standard 100x100mm square filters here. This is just great, as most of the time, you are forced with these ultra wide angle lenses to go with 150x150mm filters. Those are just less practical, and of course much pricier. My Nisi holder for this lens is already on the way, so I will revisit that soon.

LAOWA 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D lens - first impressions

Build quality

The build quality looks great. The lens is completely from metal, even the lens hood. It feels very solid and well build. It’s also relatively small for a full-frame lens. Regrettably, it’s not weather sealed. The only plastic part is the lens cap, which is not attached the best way, but it is OK. The focus wheel and the aperture wheel feel smooth and the clicks of the apertures are easily recognizable.

Usability

This is a fully manual lens, so you have to focus and set everything yourself. Focusing was a bit stranger, as I had to rotate the focus ring much more than on other lenses, and for most of the time, all is in focus anyway. It’s just how the ultra-wide-angle lenses are. The camera will not detect the F stop, so you will not see it on your screen or in Lightroom. I will have to get used to this over time.

My Canon 5D Mark IV was able to detect exposure, but in the few tests, it usually was around 1 stop brighter than I would think the correct exposure is. Still, if one compensates, this is not a problem.

How wide is 12mm?

You may wonder how wide is 12mm. So did I. So here is a comparison, with the camera on the same spot, with the same settings. All photos have the exact same RAW edits done in Lightroom, with also the same white balance. The 16,24 and 35mm shots were done with Canon 16-35mm f2.8 lens.

Picture quality

First impression is that is really good. The photos look sharp (its a bit misty and humid today, so I’m not making any final verdict from today’s photos), with very little distortion. There is some vignetting visible and even when that is removed, the corners feel a bit bluer than they should be. I will have to look into this more, but either way, it’s not so hard to remove.

The lens catches flares quite easily, but that is no surprise with such a wide lens. Again, with few simple techniques (check my guide here) they are easy to remove. I did so in the attached sample images.

RAW file

If you want to have a look, here is a RAW file from the 12mm shot shown in focal length comparison. You can have a look at the vignetting, chromatic aberrations and sharpness. But again, take into account the foggy weather (and that I used this lens only for a few hours, should be better over time :)).

You can download the RAW file from here. If you cant open the CR2 file from the 5D mark IV, you can try this DNG conversion, that you can download from here.

Sample images

Here are few images to show how much you can get with this lens. The weather was not the best today, so they are not so great, but don’t worry, there will be more from this lens in the future :)

You can also see, this is really not the best for far away scenery. The city is just so tiny in the shot. Being close to big object is the complete opposite, you just get so much into one photo.