When more becomes too many

As I walked through the forest I just took almost exclusively bracketed sets of images. Not only for a single scene but also for every image in a panoramics series, the number of images quickly multiplies.

I already take Raw & Jpeg, then 3 brackets means 6 images when I press the shutter. Next I might  take 5 overlapping photos to cover the full range of the very tall trees. And I’m up to 30 images just to get. A single final photo.  I took around 20 such multi-image panoramas and wow over 600 photos on my hard drive.

Just looking through that number of images becomes a challenge. It makes a couple of minutes (mainly waiting) to create the HDR image (using default preset/setting). Longer if I want to tweak any settings.This steps also creates another larger .Tiff file (I’m creating 16bit tiffs to get maximum dynamic range and colour info). Next the autostitch can be as fast as a few minutes for a small preview but that quickly becomes about 20minutes (again mostly waiting) if I want a large (almost full size, ie as large as assembling to component images). Even though my little HP spectre only has limited disc capacity and slightly lower speed (i5 versus i7 processor) than my desktop. memeory is the same and the HP has an SSD drive which makes everything, even lightroom, look snappier. Suddenly I realise I’m spending half and hour on each separate HDR/panorama. That’s going to be 10 hours if I want to process all images. Worst the photos and sub-stages would take up about 17 gigabytes! This is turning into a nightmare.

Ok that’s just too much. So I’ve opted to do some preview stitching to a small image size (1400 pixels wide) from the EV=0 exposures to judge the desirability to go to more complete processing. Cutting the task down to just 4 big images at the moment. The first image below I spent over half an hour setting is not one of those I wanted to keep! Such is life.

What Gum is that?

The gruff widower Holland has two possessions he cherishes above all others: his sprawling property of eucalyptus trees and his ravishingly beautiful daughter, Ellen.

When Ellen turns nineteen Holland makes an announcement: she may marry only the man who can correctly name the species of each of the hundreds of gum trees on his property.

Ellen is uninterested in the many suitors who arrive from around the world, until one afternoon she chances on a strange, handsome young man resting under a Coolibah tree….

 

… The plot of Eucalyptus a novel by Murray Bail

I thought I needed to brush up on my identification of the local eucalypts (gum trees to us aussies) as a preliminary to the Jell’s Park Photowalk, and it a lot harder than you might think.

 

 

This vertarama (a vertical panorama) is built from 5 photos using Autostitch, from straight ahead to almost vertical over head, which leads to the curved expansion at the top. I think this is a Yarra River Gum, which only grows in central/southern Victoria, and is recognized  as "in a highly precarious position and one of the most threatened of the eucalypt species". Pryor (1981). I should have included a person to show the size of this tree (probably over 30m). The pines behind it  would normally be considered tall. The CSIRO is building a guide called EUCLID , that supposedly is Identifying eucalypts made easy, I could not find it online but they are nearing 900 species now. And it isn’t so simple, the classification depends on type or bark, leaf shape, flowering, seed shape and density, branching habit and season of observation, just to mention some of parameters. The only true way to identify the Yarra River Gum, according to Dr Tree from Otway Greening, “If you're really keen to identify a yarra gum, grab some leaves and boil them in water for two minutes. If it is a yarra, a volatile oil called benzaldehyde will be given off by the process. And according to Simmons (1986) it smells of a cross between bitter almonds and fish oil!” Needless to say I haven’t done that.

A Beautiful Dark Sky

I was down at Venus Bay, and one long held desire I hold  is to be able to photograph an Aurora (the Aurora Australis) from there. The crescent moon was setting so I guessed we would have wonderful dark skies but checking the space weather indicated any activity was well south. Oh well the sun spot activity is fairly strong I’ll just have to keep waiting.

What I did find was a really beautiful sky full of stars, and a perfect opportunity to go for a really large image covering a lot of the milky way. I only had one camera (my Canon EOS 1100D) with me and my widest length lens was the EPS 18-55mm IS macro (which is a great kit lens but not so good at focusing in the dark). So I cranked up the focal length to 18ml, opened up the aperture to f4 and ISO 6400 but I still needed the full 30 second than the canon allows its maximum exposure time. The Images are fairly noise (a consequence of the high ISO but lightroom’s detail tools bough this under control without blurring the stars (too much). The next challenge was stitching the images which where essentially a two by two grid. Often stitching star panorama challenges most conventional stitching software but Autostitch did an excellent job. I had given it about 40-50% overlap on the images. However it does leave a ragged edge, so I decided to “hide” this not by cropping back tighter instead I added a sloppy edge from OnOne 10 effects borders.

 

   

This is a big view of the sky from the eastern Horizon to straight above. Taken with only an 18mm lens (on a crop sensor style DSLR)

Look Up

Sometimes the best thing to photograph requires looking up. Using a multi-stitch approach can nicely ground your subject, often at the cost of distorted perspective, This type of image and has been given the constructed name of a Vertarama. As seen on keep my tracks gps doodle walk

More Circles

   

Starry Starry Night

View of the milky way in the southern sky

In Search of Aurora Australis

 Last night had a high K index so I went out for a while looking for Aurora activity, but the ambient light of the city was probably too bright, the maximum activity was over New Zealand and probably I'm too far north anyway. Still I had a little fun doing some low light multi-stitch panoramas. This is a three photo vertarama, created with autostitch.

Looks like its back to the drawing board and a visible copyright icon on my flickr photostream.

PhotoProject :: Straightening Out

“There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.” - David Hockney

I believe what David is highlighting here is that the camera’s view of the world is from a single lens with a specific perspective. We have two eyes and “see” a much richer three dimensional worlds and our vision can be influences by our expectations. For example when we are dwarfed by tall trees we know we are surrounded by a strong vertical world. Our camera however see a more curved representation (depending on the zoom) and we will probably notice wide angle views tend to show curves where we expect strong vertical lines. For this reason many architectural photographers go to some extreme length with special cameras and lenses to overcome this perspective distortion. The Tilt/Shift lens being very popular because they do allow control of this distortion. A number of tilt/shift filters are also now becoming popular because they can be used to create the effect of looking at a miniature world.
In this vertarama, made from three *HDR photos (created by google+ autoawesome) you can see the trees enclosing over me as the camera moves higher. Ok this is pleasing in some respects but I want to show the strong vertically of these pines, so I have Tried out a plug-in for after-shoot pro called zPerspector. There are a number of similar perspective adjustment plug in fro Photoshop, gimp & even paint.net. The all perform varaiable scaling  and/or warping to adjust the image. zPerspector has a very easy to pick up approach where you can stretch and pull at each of the corner edges of your photo to thus arrive at the expected view. In my example below I am not trying to get all the trees straight and vertical (because they weren’t really) what I was looking for for trying to reproduce the strength of the trees towering over me as I remember it.