Posts in Category: panorama
6/3/2012: Near and Far, Kennebunk Bridle Path
These two shots were taken yards and moments apart, along the Kennebunk Bridle Path where it crosses Rachel Carson National Wildlife land along the Mousam River. The Bridle Path is one of my local go-to-places for birds, bugs, wildflowers, and landscapes. I have written about it before, and it rarely fails me when I am out for a local photo-prowl. I posted a set of dragon and damselfly shots from pools along the Path last week. (Dragons down by the River).
The two shots also demonstrate the range of vision available in a small compact superzoom Point and Shoot camera today. They were both taken with the same camera using the fixed zoom that came with it. I use the word vision with intent. The camera is only a tool, and I try not to get caught up too much in the technology, but as a tool, the ability of the camera to capture everything from extreme close-ups to super-wide panoramas expands my vision so that I am paying attention to everything: near and far. This is good.
The first shot is a very large bumble bee in a Beach Rose blossom. I saw the bees in the blossoms and knew it would make a good shot, so I followed a bee until it landed in a likely flower and shot it at the equivalent of 1680mm from about 5 feet away. Even on a small monitor (or laptop screen) the bee is at least twice life size.
The shot is all about fine detail: the fur on the bee, the grains of pollen on its legs, even the texture of the petals. It catches our attention because we rarely look at anything that closely.
The second shot is a three frame panorama, each frame at 24mm wide angle equivalent. I have learned to trust the exposure system of the camera to produce three well matched frames, and the Panorama function in PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements to stitch them together pretty much flawlessly. My camera has a panorama assist mode to help line up the frames, but I have found that I can do it pretty much by eye, just by rotating my upper body and squeezing off overlapping frames. This pano is about 135 degrees, and 8000 pixels wide. To see it at all well, you might want to click on the image so it opens to fill the full width of your monitor.
This shot is all about the sweep and grandeur of the cloud-scape over the landscape, and the way the light interacts with the larger geometry of the wide view. In life, our zone of attention is narrower than this. We would sweep our heads and our vision just as the camera swept, seeing this in at least 3 segments, even though if we centered our vision and relaxed, we would see the whole sweep just as it is presented in the image. We just don’t do that, or at least very often.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness (after stitching in PSE for the pano).
And for the Sunday thought: it comes down to why I feel good about having my attention expanded to cover everything from bees in the blossoms to the the play of light across the widest expanse of cloud and landscape.
I think the pressure of modern life compresses our vision and our attention. We don’t look very closely at anything and we don’t stop to take in the vista for the same reason. We don’t have time. We don’t have energy. All our attention is focused on the middle ground…the things that are large enough so we have to deal with them, but not so large that we can’t deal with them. It limits us, both in the physical, and since the physical is the living presence and present-time of the eternal spirit, in the spiritual as well. In a very real sense, our spirits are only as big, in the moment, as our attention to the world around us. Modern life makes us small. When we expand our vision we make more room for the spirit, we get bigger. We are created as spiritual beings living a physical life, to be agents of creation in this world. We can not afford to let life compress us.
So, it is good for me to have a camera that encourages my attention to the bees in the blossoms near at hand one moment, and to the way the clouds pile over the wide expanse the next. It is good.
4/11/2012: Back Creek brim full: panorama
With Back Creek brim full and an amazing sky overhead, who could resist attempting a panorama? I never learn. Panoramas with anything but absolutely still water are always a challenge. Here even the ripples move enough between shots to cause the stiching software (the PhotoMerge module in PhotoShop Elements in this case) some problems. Still it did a good job. I love the sweep of water, with its distorted reflections, under that awesome sky.
Three exposures at 24mm equivalent field of view on the Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and – 1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
2/19/2012: Winter Beach Panorama, Kennebunk ME. Happy Sunday!
I still have lots of birds and scenery (and a few other critters) left from Viera Wetlands and Merritt Island taken during my January trip to the Space Coast Birding and Nature Festival in Florida, but this Sunday morning we will return to real time and home for a 4 shot handheld panorama of the marsh, dune, and beach in late winter (taken yesterday morning). Of course the clouds are as much the subject as the beach.
This was not an easy panorama. The light was changing rapidly as the clouds moved and the variation in exposure from the marsh to the sea (the sun is just beyond the left edge of the frame) was extreme. And then the ocean is always in motion, making wave and even shore lines a problem in a pano. The four files were matched (by eye) for exposure and color temperature in PhotoShop Elements and then stitched into a pano using the PhotoMerge tool. I then took the file into Dynamic Photo HDR and tone mapped it, backing way off on the auto settings for a more natural look. Then I reimported it into Lightroom where I did some final tone matching using Graduated Filters and the Local Adjustment brush. Not perfect, but pretty satisfying. Click on the image to open it in my gallery lightbox. It will automatically display as wide as your monitor will allow.
And for the Sunday thought: I am blessed in my work to travel extensively to really great places with interesting scenery and great birds (I visit mainly birding festivals, as the Birding and Observation Product Specialist for Carl Zeiss Sports Optics, so the birds are pretty much a given). I came back from Florida with over 3000 images on my hard-drive from two cameras and close to 400 keepers uploaded to my WideEyedInWonder gallery, and I have been posting from that stock for most of a month now. And for most of that month I have been here in Kennebunk, working in my home office, and enduring the tag end of pretty blah winter. Maine, along with most of New England, got very little snow this winter, and we have had unseasonably warm temperatures. Precipitation fell, when we got any, as freezing rain…or mostly as just plain old rain. We happen to have patches of snow still on the ground (now pretty much solid white ice) right here in my neighborhood, left over from a storm in late January that seems to have been very selective in its dump, but go 2 miles in any direction and the ground is bare. So are the trees. The bushes and grasses are winter brown. Dull. Blah.
All of which is my excuse, along with the press of work, for not getting out to do any local photography. Until yesterday. And, wouldn’t you know, there were Eiders in Back Creek, and Grebes, and a couple of loons…gulls on the beach…and great clouds stretching away to the south and west. The light was our New England late winter/early spring light…nothing like the winter light of Florida…thin, so to speak, still lightly touching the ground without a lot of warmth…but with much clarity and a growing promise. The marsh and the beach and sky were beautiful. Worthy of my attention. Worthy of my admiration. Worthy of sharing.
It is so easy to just stay inside and miss it. Even yesterday I was not out long. The wind was bitter. My nose began to run, and I could feel my sinuses filling by the second. But I am very happy to have gotten out, to have seen and recorded, to have something of it to share today.
Now there is a spiritual message, to my way of thinking in all this. I am wondering this morning how much I have missed in my inward focus this last month while I lived off the stock of images and experiences from warm bright Florida. And I am not speaking of photography now, but of the heart and soul. My camera is often the tool God has given me to turn me outward…to open the eyes of my heart, to wake me to what the spirit is doing in me, in the world around me, and in those around me. I can’t afford, in the spirit, to live off my stock of images of anywhere, anytime. I need to keep current. I need to keep my focus outward.
It would have been a shame, in so many ways, to have missed what was happening down on the marsh and dune and beach, right here at home, yesterday.
10/10/2011: Oh me of little faith…fall comes to Southern Maine
I forget what a difference 24 hours can make. It is like someone pulled the stopper out of the color bottle overnight. We woke this morning to sudden fall. Still a bit muted by best year standards, but full-on fall color none the less. The leaf-peepers who reserved for Columbus Day weekend foliage are not going to be disappointed after all. 🙂
This is my favorite bow in the river at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge. I have several panoramas of this view, but I could not resist another yesterday with the color. To do it justice you need to see it larger. Click the image to open to it your full monitor width on WideEyedInWonder.
It is three shots stitched and blended in Photoshop Elements, and then processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness. (I have my WideEyedInWonder site set to a maximum of 4000 pixels wide, but the original is about 8,000 pixels wide.)
Each shot, Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. Nominal exposure, f4 @ 1/800th @ ISO 200. Program, with My Color set to Vivid. (My Color is a Canon feature that applies various processing presets, among them: sepia, b&w, vivid, vivid blue, vivid green, etc. There is a Vivid mode under the scene modes, but that is over-the-top in most situations. Super-saturated. See yesterday’s post. Vivid in My Color, however, just perks the image up enough to bring out the fall color nicely.)
And here is a closer view of the center of the image above. About 37mm equivalent field of view, f4 @ 1/640th @ ISO 125. Program, with My Color set to Vivid. Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness and cropped for composition. Again, you can see it larger by clicking the image and using the size controls (if needed) across the top of the window.
8/8/2011: Kennebunk Plains panorama
This 4 shot, full resolution panorama, done with the Nikon Coolpix P500’s Assisted Panorama mode, covers just over 180 degrees. I was, so to speak, back to back to myself for the first and last shots. I has to be viewed as large as your monitor will allow, which should happen if you click the image and open the Smugmug lightbox. (My Smugmug uploads are limited to 4000 pixels wide…the original is 11834×3030.
In an image this wide, I find that the normal horizon placement rules don’t apply. This image is almost equally split between sky and landscape, and yet to my eye, it works. Certainly the level of interest in the clouds helps, providing a effective balance for the details of the plain.
This is the Kennebunk Plains again and you can see Northern Blazing Star on the left and right in the immediate foreground. What you see here, by the way, is about 3/4 of the whole Plain. My back, in the center of the image, is to the road that divides the Plain and separates the smaller quarter on the other side, and if I had included any more on either end of the image you would have seen the road and its telephone poles.
Assisted Panorama displays the leading edge of the first shot in transparent form so you can lay it over the landscape to take image two, etc. It makes even tripod-less panos pretty easy. Here each exposure was at 32mm equivalent field of view, and nominal exposure was f5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. The image was stitched in PhotoMerge within PhotoShop Elements 9, and processed for Clarity, Intensity, and Sharpness in Lightroom.
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7/26/2011: 101 in the Shade
We had a run to three days last week when the temperatures were over 95 degrees. That is unusual weather for Kennebunk and Southern Maine…so unusual that most year-round folks, like us, do not have air conditioning. We are Mainers. We suffer through the few days each summer when we need air conditioning using window fans…taking drives in our air conditioned cars…and, of course, sneaking down to the beach when we can find parking. That generally means later in the day, in our long summer evenings. This day, the one in the pic above, the temperature was still over 100 degrees at 5PM, and there was little relief at the beach. You see a few people, in absolute desperation, out in the water. (Average summer water temperatures in the ocean off Maine beaches are between 50 and 60 degrees…and that is cold!)
I like this shot for the bright yellow slide framing the sky blue umbrella, and the general atmosphere, and the next one for the color.
Around the corner, a evening and a bit later, about 7:30PM, on Gooch’s Beach. Still in the upper 90s. Notice that the surfers are all in wet-suits.
And we will finish off with a sweep panorama of the whole beach. View it large by clicking on the image. (It is a sweep panorama, done in camera, not a stitched panorama made from individual exposures, so the resolution is not what you would expect from a stitch job…but is certainly is a lot easier 🙂
Nikon Coolpix P500. Processed for Clarity and Sharpness in Lightroom.
7/9/2011: Summer Evening 2, Kennebunk ME
The most hardy of tourists and summer folk, with a scattering of locals down to the beach late in the day. You really have to view this as large as your monitor will allow. (Just click the image) This is Gooch’s Beach in Kennebunk ME (most tourists think it is in Kennebunkport, and the point on the right, beyond the Kennebunk River, is…but the beach is solidly in Kennebunk :). This matters to summer folk with houses there and to us locals).
Not an easy pano…four shots using the Nikon’s Assisted Panorama Mode so the second shot is laid over the first, etc. I tried to work as quickly as possible to minimize movement of people and boats…not to mention the ocean…but it works for the most part.
Four 32mm equivalent field of view exposures @ f3.7 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160, stitched in PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements 9 using manual positioning. Final processing in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness. It is cropped from the bottom as there was a family in beach chairs in the shade of the wall that drew the eye down from the horizon.
This is a huge sweep. When taking the left-most exposure my back was pretty much completely to the exposure on the far right.
6/26/2011: High Plains Sky, Happy Sunday!
I had forgotten how big the sky is on the High Plains of Colorado. The Rockies push up amazing clouds that drift (or drive as the case may be) out over the gently rolling prairie. This is near Byers Colorado, about 90 miles east of the cloud factory of the Front Range peaks. It is a 4 frame panorama. Click on it to open it to the full width of your screen or monitor.
I spent an afternoon and early evening at a shooting range north of Byers demonstrating spotting scopes (work), and had an ideal opportunity to watch (and, between sessions, capture) the variety of High Plains clouds that you can see in a single day.
All these shots make use of the Nikon Coolpix P500’s Active D-Lighting to maintain detail in the clouds, and Lightroom’s Graduated Filter Effect to bring up the foregrounds. If you click the image to open it at WideEyedInWonder, and then click the Show Details button at the top right, you can see complete exif data on any of the images.
And for the Sunday thought: I really did not expect much from a shooting range on the high plains…in fact I was disappointed when I found out that our one day outside was to be further from the mountains than we already were at our hotel. I forget that no matter how flat the landscape of our lives at any given moment, the creator can, and very often does, fill the sky above with glorious evidence. We just have to look up and notice.
6/25/2011: Denver and the Front Range, panorama
You should click the image above to open it to the width of your monitor or screen. It is a thee shot panorama, each shot at 215mm equivalent field of view, with the tops of the Denver skyline on the left and the sweep of the Front Range mountains behind. I took it from the plateau above the city where they have developed the airport hotel complex, near Aurora. I caught a crow in passing, just as a bonus. I used the “assisted panorama” scene mode, hand held, on the Nikon Coolpix P500. After you take the first shot, about 1/3 of it is displayed on the left side of the finder, in transparent mode, so you can lay it directly over the live scene and line up the second shot, and so for the second, etc. for as many shots as you want to attempt. You need a program like the PhotoMerge function in PhotoShop Elements 9 to stitch the individual shots. PSE’s PhotoMerge is very sophisticated and does a excellent job of masking and tonal adjustment to make a seamless composition. It will even automatically fill in edge gaps left in the alignment.
Due to the heavy haze over the city this shot took some extra processing in Lightroom after assembly in PSE. I did my usual Clarity and Sharpness adjustments, plus some extra Recovery, Fill Light, and Blackpoint adjustment. I also did a general contrast boost, trying to offset that haze, and finally dragged a Graduated Filter effect down from the top for a local brightness and contrast adjustment (- brightenss and + contrast).
I think it captures the naked eye view pretty well.
6/16/2011: The Bowl, Acadia National Park
We got a late start on our first hike in Acadia National Park this last visit, and by the time I got to The Bowl, a little pond on the trail from Gorham Mountain to Champlain, the light was rapidly going. I am not as fast on the trail, up over Gorham, down into the divide between, and up behind the Beehive to The Bowl, as I once was. Clouds had rolled in and rain was predicted by night-fall. Still, The Bowl never fails to satisfy. The subtle light, while it posed real exposure problems…a matter of somehow maintaining detail in both sky and landscape…gave a wonderful texture to the water.
For the image above I used all the help the camera provides: Active D-Lighting to extend the dynamic range when taking the image, and then in-camera post-processing using D-Lighting after the fact to bring up greens of the foliage even more. I finished it in Lightroom with some Fill Light and Blackpoint adjustment.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f4.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160.
And I had to try a panorama. This is four 23mm frames stitched in PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements 9, and processed for Clarity, Sharpness, and lighting in Lightroom. It is about 270° so the right most shot was behind my right shoulder when I took the left most shot. It looks better at larger sizes. Click the image to open it to the width of your monitor.
