Gallery Pick of the Week
Instead of just showing pretty pictures only, here we have space for contributors to discuss their images every week.
This is a great opportunity to get some insight from the original photographer and the content is entirely open. It could be anything from the personal feeling of the photographer about the image to any photographic techniques or location knowledge he/she would like to share with our visitors.
Gallery Pick of the Week > March 2009
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Black Saturday in Victoria, 29/3/09, Peter and Jill Myers "We drove straight past the main bushfire area of Kinglake and its surrounds and boy oh boy does this send shivers up your spine. I cannot begin to imagine what it must have been like for the poor souls who were trapped in this area on Black Saturday" |
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Shooting Digitial Panoramas, 20/3/09, John Sheridan Unless you have a fat wallet capable of purchasing a true landscape camera that can capture a large expanse of scenery in one gulp, you will probably have to resort to a cheaper and simpler means of capturing those wide detailed landscapes. |
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Hidden Gems of Sydney - Walking around Sydney Harbour foreshores – Part 1, 13/3/09, Barbara Bryan There are other sides to visiting Sydney.....why not consider walking or strolling along various sections of the beautiful northshore coastal walks? There are many hidden gems waiting to be discovered. |
Peter and Jill Myers - Black Saturday in Victoria, 29/3/09
When returning from a weekend trip to Beechworth, we stopped off at the site of the earlier bushfires, just to the South of Beechworth. For the first time we really got a sense of the scale and magnitude of these fires.
Thousands upon thousands of acres of land totally burned and occupied by a new eerie species of plant...dead trees with black trunks and brown leaves, growing in a scarred barren black and brown fields...
No photograph we could take could do justice to the scene...but we tried!
Sunday evening saw another group dinner at the local pub before retiring for our final night stay at the Priory.
Monday morning saw the group depart in different directions for the journey home. We decided to travel via the "back roads" to Mansfield, just to get a sight of the very sparsely populated bush areas of Victoria.
We finally arrived in Mansfield in mid afternoon with the car now covered in dust and dirt from the unsealed roads we had been travelling on for over 2 hours!
After a late lunch in Mansfield we travelled down to Jameison, but the road across to Eildon was closed because of the previous fires, so we drove back up to Mansfield and joined the thousands of other cars on the drive back to Melbourne via the Yarra valley and the Melba highway. We drove straight past the main bushfire area of Kinglake and its surrounds and boy oh boy does this send shivers up your spine. I cannot begin to imagine what it must have been like for the poor souls who were trapped in this area on Black Saturday.
Mile after mile of this new tree species populated the black scarred fields. I wonder how long it will take for this region to recover?
Back home on Monday evening after a very enjoyable trip. We enjoyed the company immensely, we took some good photos and generally had a great time...but the overriding memory is of those bushfire affected areas...once again reinforcing my view of how fortunate we are...
John Sheridan - Shooting Digitial Panoramas, 20/3/09
I have taken panorama shots for about 5 years now and still learning tips and tricks to getting what you want. My interest was stimulated with viewing some of Ken Duncan’s work in a local restaurant, my favorite being one of a river bed lined with gum trees that positively glow with the rays of a setting/rising sun.
Unless you have a fat wallet capable of purchasing a true landscape camera that can capture a large expanse of scenery in one gulp, you will probably have to resort to a cheaper and simpler means of capturing those wide detailed landscapes, as I have done.
Allow me to suggest a series of steps to guide the novice to an acceptable series of pictures that can be stitched together to form a complete panorama picture.
Shooting
- Use a tripod and set your camera up sideways, allowing you to gain more land and sky per each shot. This will demand more pictures to encompass the entire desired view, which is GOOD! The more pictures you can blend into your masterpiece, the more information you will have to create a sharper, more detailed final image. This also means that you can print a larger image with preserved detail and sharpness.
- My favorite lens was a Canon 28 – 200mm with most landscapes shot within the 55-65 range setting. You of course must determine what works best for you in collecting individual pictures that will make up your own panorama.
- I generally level my camera by ignoring those bubble levels and instead, do a number of trial sweeps across the landscape, carefully watching the position of one of those markers, squares, etc in the viewfinder to see that it tracks evenly across the horizon. If it appears to get higher or lower as you pan across, adjust your camera position or tripod legs accordingly until it appears to be at the same position from one end of the scene to the other.
- I usually find what appears to be the brightest section of the panorama, setting the lens at apeture priority and checking the timing at that position. When you start making adjustments of your picture in the computer I generally find it easier to lighten an underexposed picture, and if part of your sky or clouds is blown out, there is nothing you can do to retrieve this information. Then I set the camera on manual and make the settings determined by the brightest check. You should also set the focus on manual so that nearby trees, bushes, or other objects do not cause the focus to change in the middle of your series. While most of the time you can choose an ISO speed of 100, in dim lighting as at sunset or sunrise you may want to change this to a higher speed.
- I always shoot from left to right, as most computer stitch programs demand this order when putting your pictures together. Of course you can always go back and insert pictures in reverse order but this just adds to the work you have to do.
- Overlap your pictures in the series, approximately 20% of the viewed image. It certainly will not hurt if your overlap is 25 or even 30%, you can always compensate in the computer to get rid of the excess doubling of information but you cannot go back and add information that is not there.
- I would suggest you do at least two series of shots if not more. You will find at times just one of those singular shots will be unusable for some reason, like the camera moved or a gust of wind caused a movement of a tree or bush. Just one bad image with make the whole series of shots worthless as it is highly unlikely that one picture from a different series will fit into another series.
Four images shot in portrait format to maximise the height
- Putting all your images together is dependent on what kind of software you are using. In the old days prints were actually cut and pasted together by hand, a very challenging procedure requiring great skill with a knife and pasting dexterity. Today our computers can literally cut and paste pictures together within seconds. I have been through programs like Photoshop Elements 2 – 5, Photoshop 7, CS 2 and most recently CS 3, and used a program called PanaVue Image Assembler as well. PanaVue offered a number of tools to assemble pictures including the placing of a number of flag markers to locate specific parts of one print to join to specific parts of another print. You could also adjust blending in order to smooth out parts of the sky when lighting grew darker or lighter as you moved across the panorama. This was tricky because blending the sky at higher settings caused the edges of the joined landscape to become blurred or fuzzy, so overall it became a compromise of getting the land or the sky to look reasonably sharp and natural. My current favorite program is within Photoshop CS 3. I find all I’ve had to do is select the pictures to join, choose which landscape mode to use and click on the mouse to start the joining process. From that point it is all automatic with the end results being a well joined image that is most pleasing.
Stitched in Photoshop CS3 Before Cropping
Printing
- Printing is of course desirable in putting your masterpiece into a display that others can admire, or even purchase. Before printing, spend a good deal of time examining your print onscreen at 100% or greater. Clone out undesirable features like dust spots, errant road signs, etc. Believe me in saying that NOTHING is more frustrating than paying hundreds of dollars on getting that BIG print on canvas to notice a missed dust spot splat in the middle of your print, making it useless to a perceptive buyer. Actually you ought to do this prior to joining all of those individual pictures, but even if you have done this, do a final check before running your panorama through a printer. Realize too that if you have a sizable panorama, printing it out on A4 or even A3 paper, the longer the panorama, the smaller the overall print you will get. A panorama made of 10 or more individual pictures is going to produce a print that may only cover 30% of your paper with the rest being scrap. This will be very obvious in your print preview. While it is possible to print your panorama in pieces made up of single A4 prints or larger it is not generally practical if you end up with 4 or more individual prints to put together though I have seen exhibited panoramas of 10 or more A4 prints. It is all a matter of your own personal choice from here though using a printer capable of printing from rolls of paper or canvas is generally the most practical means of producing panamoras.
- You should realize that panoramas created from 6- 10 or more single photographs can add up to large files. We are taking hundreds of megs of memory for one print. Obviously you want to use a fairly modern computer capable of handling large files quickly and efficiently. Just 2 years ago, using an older model I would sit and wait up to a half hour for a 300mg picture to download from an external HD, and equal time to save it again after making any changes.
- Extras! While my favored medium for printing is matt finish canvas, especially for my larger prints, I do print smaller versions, half as long and tall as the biggies, and put them in clear plastic tubes to sell. These paper prints MUST be protected under glass when displayed. The cost of paper prints is a fraction of that of a large canvas. As to cost of printing, I was told that on average professional printers in SA charge around $100 per ft to print a canvas. To be frank here, I bought my own large scale printer, a HP 24” 8 colour printer that each time you introduce a new medium will print a test pattern, read it and set a profile for that material. The cost was around $7,000 AU and the inks run around $170. for a double pack of any colour. Realize though that a single ink cartridge can last up to a year (for me) if you don’t do a lot of printing. On average the canvas costs between $6-7. per ft and even on the largest prints, up to 2.4 metres in length I have never estimated ink usage at more than $15, and this is at the highest quality settings. Do the math and you will get an idea of the profits for professional printing, but they have employees and a shop to pay for. I generally print only my work, and respect the folks in town who do this for a living. Regardless of who does your printing, you might also consider using a preservative over your finished canvas. I have used a spray finish called Crystal Clear, Matt finish on some of my prints, and none on others. There is no obvious difference in appearance of treated and untreated prints. There is another product called Gilclee that can be rolled, brushed or sprayed on art work. There is at present no definite proof that either of these products will extend the life of your print and you probably won’t be around to witness its demise anyway. It is even possible the product might actually discolor over time, I really don’t know and cannot advise anyone on this subject.
- I have a software product called Genuine Fractals, used to enlarge smaller prints, supposedly up to 1000 times without reduction in quality. I have used it on occasion to turn a single landscape print into a poster sized print on canvas or paper. It works reasonably well and while creating an acceptable print on canvas, it really cannot come close to the sharpness and detail you get from combining 3 or more pictures together. Still, if you have a favorite picture that you’d like to enlarge the program is worth a try.
Most folks reading this will presume that a panorama is always some scenic view showing mountains, lakes, beaches, etc. While this is certainly true, you can take a panorama series of shots of almost anything that is not moving. I’ve done panoramas of flowers, spiders, while one of my most dramatic is just a cloud formation at sunrise. To do small objects you must be very careful to keep the camera the same distance from the subject while shooting straight on as you pan across. Often you will find this easier if you move the object instead of the camera although professional photographers who use the camera to copy large works of art insist it is the camera that must be moved, often with a specially built track along which the camera is moved. Try it for yourself and you might be shocked at how easy it can be to do say 3 photographs across a single flower and end up with an image that can be easily printed at poster size. The only thing holding you back is your imagination.
Barbara Bryan - Hidden Gems of Sydney - Walking around Sydney Harbour foreshores – Part 1, 13/3/09
There are other sides to visiting Sydney.....why not consider walking or strolling along various sections of the beautiful northshore coastal walks? There are many hidden gems waiting to be discovered, even by long term residents like me who find something new every time I step out there!
During February I experienced a wonderful half day being constantly uplifted by stunning views through the trees, nearly stepping over wildlife, passing shapely angophora trees, discovering historic spots, finding desrted beaches and watching passing ferries, yachts and ships! All within ferry distance of the CBD! Grab a map from the information booth at Circular Quay or online Sydney information.
Walking around the Sydney Harbour National Park coastline, past the famous Taronga Zoo, is a delight and includes the historic Curlew Cove where members of the famous Australian Heidelberg school of painters spent many years (from late 1800s), painting scenes. Arthur Streeton,Tom Roberts and others painted many of their well known scenes from this spot or nearby Sirius Cove and camped out overnight there too. Now there is a viewing platform, seating and historic signage to inform you of the cove's place in history.
1. Mosman Boat Harbour. 2. Curlew Camp - City View. 3. Curlew Camp - Streetons View.
Next stop was delightful tiny Whiting Beach where I enjoyed my coffee all by myself whilst admiring the city skyline directly across the harbour and some passing ferries and yachts. I could not believe the feeling of isolation and peacefulness so close to a large urban area!
4. Sydney City View from Mosman. 5. Sydney Skyline and Beach
Onwards past another lookout, magnificent shapely angophoras (photo 6), I passed Bradley's Head with its distinctive structure, being the mast from the first HMAS Sydney warship, erected as a memorial to all the 'Sydney' naval ships.(photo 7). Here were some artists with their easels, and more photo opportunities including an amazing tree root in sandstone (photo 8).
6. Sydney Angophora Tree Trunk Base. 7. Sydney NP-Mast. 8. Sydney-Tree Root in Sandstone.
As I continued on my lone walk past yet another deserted beach, I spotted a distinct monitor lizard by the track,(photo 9), then passed through a delightful glade of lush ferns (photo 10), and headed towards Clifton Beach, (where there is a small cafe before the climb up through the old Penguin naval base) which is now open to the public and undergoing restoration. The walk continues on as long as you want!
9. Sydney Harbour NP-Lace Monitor. 10. Sydney Harbour NP Track.
All the coastal walks are accessible by ferry from Circular Quay with your best option going across to the Taronga Zoo wharf, Cremorne Point wharf or Mosman Bay wharf. Another option is to start and finish by car by parking in a Mosman residential street just north of the zoo near Sirius Cove.
My next series will cover walking further along the northshore around Waverton and Greenwich areas which show more vistas, boats, shapes in nature and old industrial remnants - all accessible by train, bus or ferry as well as car and walking tracks.