View allAll Photos Tagged Perfectly,
ODC-Handmade
The Reindeer were a gift from my cousin and her husband. He is a retired carpenter and has made many of these little reindeer for family and friends. They fit perfectly on my mantle. I just love them!
M: eurghhh... i had this crazy dream...
10: that wasn't a dream.
M: wot?!
10: yeeaaahh. you want me to come with? i'm sure we can work something out.
M: i can manage perfectly well on my own!
10: welll... to be honest... that's.... sort of what i'm afraid of...
Still going through my archives today. These were taken last month using my 100 mm portrait lens and the Kenko 36 mm extension tube. They are not cropped but are full frame photos.
In perfectly still conditions during the afternoon of 16 January 2016, the driver has full control of his locomotive, JS 8167, and its thirteen wagon trailing load as it makes a text book departure, the locomotive climbing positively away from the Sandaoling opencast mine loading point. There is alleged to be four more years worth of coal in the deep pit beyond the loaders, but how long the steam traction can continue without heavy maintenance equipment in the workshops remains to be seen.
© Gordon Edgar - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission
I made a delivery here tonight, about 7:30pm. It was a perfectly warm evening and a beautiful sky. And I wish I could be able to enjoy a home and a view. 7:29pm, Old Town Arvada.
It rained today. I forgot to close my windows a while ago so some water entered my room T___T. I went out with my mum to look for furniture to be added in our new house in Alaminos, so much fun!
Had a little love, but I spread it thin
Falling in her arms and out again
Made a bad name for my game around town
Tore up my heart, and shut it down
Nothing to do
Nowhere to be
A simple little kind of free
Nothing to do
No one but me
And that's all I need
I'm perfectly lonely
~marilyn monroe
not sure if you all have noticed, but all my kids have their right eye a teeny bit smaller then their left (it is emphasized when they smile - clearly here on miss A). Or, maybe their right cheek is just bigger? LOL. I don't know, I love it!
**************************************************
© Copyright.. You can not use!
© Copyright .. Você não pode usar!
© Derecho de Autor .. . No se puede usar!
© Copyright .. Sie können nicht!
© حقوق النشر.. الالغام. لا يمكنك استخدام!
**************************************************
This perfectly monochrome butterfly was found in a park on Bohol, Philippines.
Many of them were flying around but one of them just relaxed. And so I tiptoed towards it and managed to get this image.
The palm trees are contributing to the handheld shot as a nice greenish background.
I am happy about any critical comments on that!
To all of the people who feel uncomfortable in their bodies because they aren't where they want to be right now - this one is for you ❤
Photography & Retouching: Intimate Studios Melbourne
Hair & Makeup: Mish Bratsos
30minutes after this shot the 4 cubs were lined up perfectly on the top of the mound, but the light had gone and I was more than happy just to watch them rather than risk taking any dodgy shots. I'm going to have a practice with flash, but it's something I'm not used to doing. It really is a great pleasure to be with these animals as they go about their evening tasks just feet away.
Anova Moretti, owner of the ritzy Kobori Boutique in the Paprihaven Mall,* enjoys the spring blooms.
Anova is accompanied, as usual, by Sudz, her faithful Hush Puppy.
__________________________
As seen in Paprihaven 682!
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/19227616438/]
A perfectly calm morning in the Trossachs, not long before this there was a huge bank of thick mist covering the entire scene, you could barely even see the lone fishing boat in the loch....
As the sun breaks over the hills the mist rises and starts to dissapear leaving behind this scene with the first bits of warm light breaking through the trees and reflecting into the loch.
Not another soul around here this morning, just me and rather enormous Heron that was fishing in the loch, magic. There's meant to be a few Ospreys here too but I didn't see them.
i did this to irratate anyone who likes a (perfect) (even) (symmetrical) photo:)
kinda came out brilliant
We can barely walk in the forests without stepping on mushrooms these days. Is'nt it beautiful?
Shot with a reversely mounted Zeiss lens at F8 and a diy flash reflector. Stack of three images handheld. Please look at it in large and don't miss the second shot in the comments!
As always, written notes, also critial comments and favorites are highly appreciated. Have a great time.
Here is an 8,000 pixel-wide version of my 80,000 pixel-wide San Francisco panorama. I just realized that I had never posted it to Flickr, so here you go! No HDR and no Gigapan machine required. I'll explain below and don't forget to fave and share it on the internet if you like it. I always forget that when I look at panos.
Have a look at the super-super-big 8,000 pixel wide version!! C'mon, you know you want to!
www.flickr.com/photos/patrick-smith-photography/587464094...
Most gigapixel images are created during daylight hours or well after dark, conditions at which the light is consistent over dozens (or hundreds) of shots. However, I wanted the entire panorama to be done during the rapidly changing light that occurs just after sunset. It was not as easy as I first thought!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Settings etc.
-----------------------------------------------------------
112 11-second exposures (they were almost all 11-seconds to keep the city lights constant)
All shots were taken between 20 and 27 minutes after sunset on several nights over a 6-week period.
The final size is (13,423h x 80,540w, 1×6 ratio)
AutoPano stitching software to start, but 50% was hand-stitched
Canon 5D mark II with live view set to 10x magnification to help with precise focusing
Canon 500L F4 lens with 1.4 extender (after the 800 rental expired!)
3 rows of portrait oriented shots with about 35-40 on each row
25% overlap on each shot
Refocus every 3rd shot with extra care on the towers and hillside to the left
Refocus on Bridge towers to make sure that every bolt can be seen clearly
No grad filters
No polarizer.
No HDR
ISO 200 (to reduce the exposure time a bit but not too much to induce noise)
RAW files processed with Capture One by Phase One
TIFF files processed with Photoshop
Tripod – 1 home depot bucket with a circular 1-inch thick plywood board rotated on top to create panoramas. Jessy calls it "The Pano-Pod!" I like it!
Amazingly, If I had simply used the 500 with no 1.4tc, I might have been able to do it all in one night with about 60 shots. But the extra resolution meant I could print it at 36ft @240DPI instead of about 20 feet. Big difference!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Story
-----------------------------------------------------------
I wanted to create an image that would look like a single photo taken during that 5-10 minute period about 20 minutes after sunset where the softening natural light is about equal to city lights. A photograph created at this time will not have blown-out highlights but still have the glowing atmosphere of a nocturnal view. Since I needed to shoot over 30 photos per row and at least 3 rows tall, I knew that it would take several favorable days to shoot them all. This is because there are only a few minutes with good light after sunset and each exposure would take around 7-12 seconds to shoot. Also, with the 800mm lens I rented from borrowlenses.com you have to be very precise about focus, and setting the focus using the Live View feature adds even more time to each shot.
Shooting
I was excited to begin. The next 10 days looked clear and warm, so off I went. This was last November, but it was warm. The first obstacle was how to stabilize this huge lens during 10-second plus exposures when it is perched on the side of a hill exposed to strong ocean wind. The Golden Gate is the easiest place for wind to pass through the California coastal mountain range so there is a lot of it passing through. The sturdiest tripod is no match for these breezes so I had to come up with another solution.
I headed over to Home Depot and bought a 1-inch thick rounded and sanded plywood wheel that is about 18 inches in diameter. It is about the size of a very large pizza. Also I bought a plastic bucket, a short 1×4 and some thin wood shims. The idea is to place the plywood onto the bucket and then put the lens on the plywood. Then it is easy to rotate the lens right and left. The bucket is low to the ground and very stable even in high winds with the big lens on it. Also, it is easy to level the entire thing using by moving it in the dirt until your line of sight across the wheel is level with the horizon. I cut the 1×4 to a length of about 6 inches and cut notch in the middle so that the end of the lens would rest in the notch. That stops the lens from rolling around. The thin wood shims are then used to raise and lower the camera side of the lens. With this setup, you can shoot an entire row, insert or remove some shims and then shoot another row.
For the first 10 days, visibility over the bridge was perfect but it was hot and the city lights twinkled. Twinkling when viewed through 800mm of lens makes the entire frame flicker back and forth as though you are looking into a swimming pool on a windy day! During daylight it is not too bad because you can have an exposure time of 1/100 or less and things may look a bit wavy but at least they are sharp. At night, an 11-second exposure with the heat shimmering will make the entire image soft in a similar way to what you might see on a long exposure of ocean waves. Even my morning shooting suffered from atmospheric distortion. After 10 days with that magnificent lens I had nothing to show for my efforts! Needless to say I was a bit discouraged. However, I am not one to give up easily, so I borrowed a friend’s 500mm F4 and a 1.4 extender for a total of 700mm of magnification. Fortunately, he was very patient because it took about 4 extra weeks to get the images I needed.
Eventually the weather cooled, the atmosphere stabilized and the twinkling was dramatically reduced. Next, my hope was to get some mist in the atmosphere over several days to get through the entire panorama with consistent light. I made a total of about 20 trips to my spot before I had all the images I needed. All of the images used to make the final pano were captured on five of those evenings.
There were other problems during shooting besides the atmospheric distortion. First, the focus. The city is far behind the bridge, so when I was shooting the towers in front of the city I had to stop down to about F29 and focus extra carefully and do an extra long exposure. On the left side of the panorama were some foreground hills, so I had to refocus there too as well as every few shots throughout the panorama because the focus ring might get moved just a little. Most images, however, were made at F11. This allowed me to get enough depth of field to keep everything sharp. The DOF at F8 (the optimum setting) is too shallow and would cause something in each frame to be out of focus. I kept the exposure time down to 11-seconds by using an ISO of 200. There was very little noise in the final images.
The next problem is that I had to come back on successive days and pick up where I left off. So I had to arrive well before sunset to set up and practice what I was about to do. It is easy to not be perfectly aligned with a row from the day before. If you are not perfect all the way across then you don’t get enough overlap for stitching.
The other big problem is that the light was changing quickly and was different from the far left side to the far right side. This is a very wide-angle image so this is to be expected. So if you attempt a gigapixel image at dusk, study the direction of how the light fades and start shooting from the darkest areas and move towards the lightest. By the time you get to the lighter areas, they will be closer in brightness to the darker side. This way, the overall image will be more evenly lit.
Processing
I brought the images into Capture One, a RAW processing program. It has lots of settings which allow you to gain a little extra dynamic range and still have the image look natural. I collected the best images from all the shoots into one folder and carefully adjusted them for brightness and color. This went fairly smoothly, though there were a few images where I had to dig deeper. The idea is to have all the images be the same brightness.
I saved each one as a JPG because I knew the final file would be huge and I don’t have a super powerful computer! Also, I didn’t touch the JPGs until I had created a PSB file after stitching. TIFF files can only be 4gb in size and a 16-bit file would be 5gb. I ended up creating an 8-bit file but I kept it in PSB format, anyway. I did not lose any information as would be the case if I edited the JPGs directly. And JPG files have a 30,000 pixel width limit.
Originally I planned on using the highly rated Autopano stitching software. It did a great job until it reached areas where the bridge cables were in front of the bay water. As you can see in the small portion below, one cable or a bridge section looks like the next. The stitching software became confused no matter how I adjusted the settings. I auto-stitched as much as I could and then I stitched the remainder of the image (about 50%) manually in Photoshop. Fortunately there was plenty of overlap and after about 80 hours of work, the image was completely stitched.
After stitching, I went over the TIFF image carefully while viewing it at 100% magnification. I cleaned up any bad pixels or stitching errors. There was a bit of noise in some of the darker areas so I used the Photoshop noise reduction and that worked fine. Then I looked at the entire image to make sure that the entire scene looked evenly lit. A few places needed to be brightened or darkened but the adjustments were small because I was careful when creating the first set of files from the RAW files..
The combination of the 500L lens and the 1.4 II teleconverter along with close attention to focus created a final image that was very sharp. Most of the image needed no sharpening, though some areas were sharpened a bit just to get things as close to perfect as possible.
The total amount of time I spent doing recon, 20 trips to the location, and post processing was around 160 hours. Was it worth it? Yes!
I'm continuing the cityscape theme with a small portion of a bigger 64-shot panorama created with the Canon 500L F4 lens. I'll be back at doing the landscape in a few weeks. No HDR.
Free wallpaper for over 100 of my images in 6 different screen sizes is now available!
See the tourists in this super big 1800 pixel version!!
(Ignore the compression blobs, they are not there in the real version!)
www.flickr.com/photos/patrick-smith-photography/519375661...
---------------------------------------------------------
Settings etc.:
---------------------------------------------------------
Canon 5D Mark II - 6 portrait photos (64 total in the Panorama) stitched with Autopano version 2
Canon 500L F4 (with live preview magnified to 10x to get it perfectly sharp with the background soft.)
Be careful, as a lens cools down after being in a hot car, you have to refocus every minute or so!
6-second exposures @F6 (to speed it up but too narrow DOF now, F13 better.)
No grad filters
No polarizer.
ISO 300 (to speed it up a bit for the big pano to follow)
RAW files processed with Capture One by Phase One
TIFF files processed with Photoshop
Tripod - 1 home depot bucket with a circular 1-inch thick plywood board rotated on top to create panoramas. (this setup far more stable than the most sturdy tripod and only US $15!) I'm not kidding!!! Make sure it is perfectly level so that the entire panorama is level.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Story
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As I mentioned last time, I've been commissioned to do some extremely large 2-gigapixel-sized panoramas with a Canon 800mm lens. But it is difficult to get the entire thing with the perfect light shown here. So this is a small portion of an alternate panorama with the 500mm that is 16,000 pixels tall x 80,000 wide = 1.6 gigapixels. Maybe that is enough?
In addition to the problems below, I discovered that even at F8, the foreground people and hill (> 1 mile, 1.6km) away are out of focus when the city is in focus. So I have to go to F13. Still, at f13 it is all sharp and I notice no degradation of the image. The atmosphere has been warm and unstable so I only noticed this after a week of shooting!
Eventually I'll post more from these panoramas. They take forever to process since they are not just a giant gigapixel shot that you see often now, but rather more like a single shot with that good light that lasts for just a few minutes... but blown up big!
Problems reposted from last time:
Since each photo is a 5-10 second exposure and the eventual gigapixel photo will be 3 portrait shots high by 30 shots wide, and you only get 5 minutes of good light like above, I had to come up with a way to do each photo quickly. However, moving a big lens on a tripod requires quite a while to settle down to stability for each shot. So, I went to the local Home Depot (hardware store) and bought a large plastic bucket, some door shims (small angled wood slices to go under the camera to adjust the lens up or down), and a round piece of 1 inch thick sanded plywood to rotate on top of the bucket. It worked perfecty for a super sharp 30,000 pixel pano I did last night. Even in the wind, the lens does not move at all even when viewed in live preview at 10x.
The road up here on the Marin Headlands was just rebuilt and just reopened. You used to be able to drive right to this spot (amazingly) and shoot this photo right out of your car door! (Though a 500mm lens would shake too much.) It is an amazing cooincidence considering that this spot is over 1 mile to the Golden Gate Bridge and 7 miles to the Transamerica Pyramid Building seen through the opening in the tower. However, there is no place to stop now because of a guardrail and some earth moving work so you have to park below and hike up to this location. I'll include the exact spot on the map.
Once I was there, I set up my bucket and wiggled it around in the dirt to get it flat and stable. Then I placed the round plywood board on top and moved it around to make sure it was perfectly flat.
Then I put the camera with the huge lens on the wood and used wood shims to get the lens pointed up to the top row and shot a small panorama of a few shots on each row to practise my speed and accuracy. Just add shims under the camera to move to a lower row. I'll explain the rest of the procedure when I show the a portion of the bigger panorama. It would not fit into the Flickr scheme of things but the detail is incredible. I really could hardly believe it!
The map shows the exact location.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Other stuff
---------------------------------------------------------------------
My pictures are featured on the front page of the newly redesigned
The state Gov. of California website. Have a look! It is Flash with my pics cut into layers for a 3-d slideshow. If you are into building apps, the State has opened up lots of data to the public, so check it out!
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Resources:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Google Earth
Simply the best way to scout out locations that there is. You can see sun angles and pre-visualize light under lots of different conditions. Sometimes you can actually pre-compose your shots! This has saved me many thousands of vertical feet of climbing by avoiding spots with blocked views etc.
Satellite imagery (choose 'National' for a local US region or use your fave website)
www.wrh.noaa.gov/satellite/?wfo=mtr
Tide charting and preditions: (chose your area in US, other countries have similar websites)
tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/tide_predictions.shtml?gid=235
Wave Heights (I choose 'North Pacific from Global')
polar.ncep.noaa.gov/waves/main_int.html
Or Here:
www.opc.ncep.noaa.gov/shtml/RP1bw.gif
Photos of every inch of the California coastline from a small plane. Excellent for close in detailed views.