Twin Geeks Photography

So, Terence does all these D-I-Y posts on framing and flash repair and so on; I’m introducing my own new little section, Anatomy of a Photo, where we’ll take some specific photo and deconstruct all the steps that were necessary to create it. So to start with, we’ll use my panorama of Edinburgh, Scotland taken from Arthur’s Seat in Holyrood Park.

(For full effect, you need to view that shot in full size, though that’s only 19% of the full resolution of the image.)

Obviously, half of a good panorama is finding a really striking point to shoot from. In this case, I decided beforehand that I wanted to get a panorama of Edinburgh from up on Arthur’s Seat. For those not familiar with Edinburgh, there’s a large park with a set of hills (really, almost small mountains, as they have cliffs suitable for climbing) in the city. And Holyrood Park is dominated by Arthur’s Seat, the largest of these hills. The Seat towers over Edinburgh, tall enough to be seen from neighboring towns.

A local photographer actually warned me off this shot beforehand, saying that if you go completely up to the top you can’t get a good panorama and that if you go only partway up you will probably have much of the city blocked by the rest of the Seat. He was completely right, but I decided to try this anyway because I felt there was a good view to be had. I’m glad I did, so my second point in ‘finding your shot’ is that it’s better to try a shot and fail at it, than to go ‘well, no, I won’t bother’ and always regret it. Especially when traveling, when you might not get another shot! Some of my favorite shots of mine — this panorama, the picture of the sunrise through the ruins of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi — are pictures I gambled on getting, while traveling.

Once you’ve found the shot you want to take, of course, the next step is taking it. I was a bit of an idiot in this case; I only needed the tripod (Manfrotto CXPRO3), the camera (Canon 5D Mark II), the lens (EF 50mm f/1.4) and the pano setup (ReallyRightStuff panning clamp and nodal slide), but I carried the entire camera bag from Edinburgh Castle down to Holyrood Park, then halfway up Arthur’s Seat. Without water. Do not try this at home. Or while traveling. Or, really, ever. Be smarter than me; at least bring a water bottle!

The panning clamp is important, obviously, since you can keep the camera level but still rotate it. However, it’s not /absolutely/ necessary in all cases (my ball-head also rotates at the base, in a pinch I could have used that). However, the nodal slide is /vital/ to getting a good panorama like this. ReallyRightStuff has an excellent page on why, but the short form is that you will have distortions (and a lot more work to do in editing) if you aren’t pivoting the camera around the focal point of the lens.

Of course, you need to specifically calibrate for a given lens. We’ll be writing a more in-depth tutorial on how we do this, but ReallyRightStuff has an excellent page on the basics, in the meantime. Generally, you want to calibrate for a given lens /before/ you’re out in the field shooting with limited time, if you can. Trying to calibrate the 50mm up on Arthur’s Seat would have been a logistical nightmare; to get far enough away from the camera, I might well have fallen off a cliff trying to do it. Not really ideal. But Terence and I had already calibrated the 50mm for panoramas long ago; I knew precisely where to position the camera on the nodal slide.

So once I was all set up to take the panorama itself, I metered the scene and set my exposure manually. You need the exposure to remain constant across a panorama, or else you will have weird issues when you try to stitch them together. In this case, I chose to take 20 panels. Each panel was 3 exposures; the main manually set exposure, then two others bracketed +/- 1.5EV. Each panel overlapped the neighboring panel by 50%.

For the sake of smooth shots, I set the 5D2 to fire on a 2 second timer, and set the Auto Exposure Bracketing accordingly. Then I merely lined up the shot, hit the shutter and waited two seconds, and the camera fired off three shots without my hand there to introduce any vibrations.

Here is a sample of the first two panels in the panorama. You can see the three exposures at each of the positions, and then the combined HDR version of that panel.

The HDR was done using Photomatix Pro — batch processing keeps me sane! — and a bit of tweaking in Photoshop to add my own tweak or, as Terence calls it, “Secret Sauce” to give that sort of dreamlike quality I wanted in this case. I only stumbled across this particular “secret sauce” in the past few days, and will quite possibly go back and redo some of my other UK HDR shots using this technique. If you like doing HDR, I recommend finding your own specific ‘look’ that you like; in this case, I think I finally found mine.

Once I had 20 TIFF files for the panorama, I started up Photoshop CS4’s “Photomerge” tool and dropped the 20 panels in. Photoshop ground along through a percentage bar for a while, and spit out the final panorama. Then it was just a matter of cleanup and tweaking to ensure the result was satisfactory, a reduction in size to 19% of full (for purposes of posting the panorama), and adding a watermark. And, of course, blogging about this.

I probably could’ve made a better explanation of the process here, but feel free to post questions if you have any, and Terence or I will try to answer. Otherwise, enjoy the photo!

So today is a first here on the Shutteresque blog, where we take a question from the audience! My friend Jon asked me, “If you’re trying to take a picture of a cityscape, how do you pick a focal point?”

When you are shooting with a point-and-shoot camera, there’s probably not much you can do other than try to pick the most distinctive/unique building, or some other element of the scene which stands out and deserves to be the center of attention. The easiest way is to find what draws your eye naturally once you’ve composed a shot, and focus on that. Generally that will be the element that draws the viewer’s eye as well, so having it in focus is an easy choice. But you can get creative; sometimes I like to leave the entire cityscape ever-so-slightly blurred, and focus on a tree nearer to me.

If you’re shooting with a camera with manual controls — and this does include some ‘point and shoots,’ I note — you have a few more options beyond just picking a focal point and taking what the camera gives you. But to really make use of those options you need a bit of understanding of precisely how a photographic image is exposed.

Onwards to the quick summary/refresher course!

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