Calibration Report

Panorama Submission

 Panorama

This panorama was taken in Leura up in the blue mountains. Shot at 200mm the vertical stitch was a favorite of mine across three morning shoots. I choose to have the aesthetic quite underexposed because the feel of the image suited it. I stitched the image in photoshop after processing in Camera Raw. It was stitched using auto align and auto blend because both photomerge and ptgui refused to stitch the image. PTGUI had issues with the repetitious trees and soft graduated sky. Photomerge i have always had troubles with.

After the image was stitched i created  +1 and -1 exposure jpgs and used photomatix to extract some detail from the trees. Overall i am happy with the image, it is an example of straight landscape photography but has an abstract element due to the soft lines and colours. I believe the image would print well as it has a high megapixel count and it isn't over processed.

 Below are the source files.

Cinemagraph Presentation

Cinemagraph

I decided to do a Cinemagraph for my presentation in Tech 3. A cinemagraph is made from a clip or short movie and has its heritage in internet gifs, It was created by one Jaimie Beck. A still is extracted from the movie while a particular part of the clip continues on loop. At first as I assumed it would be a fairly easy exercise i assigned myself the task of creating a moving clip solely from a still image. However as it turn out making a cinemagraph is very time consuming and I only found a few shortcuts after making my first.


Here are some great examples of cinemagraphs.

Clip from1951Darnell user with link:
 http://youtu.be/U9KiIjyCTpI

To create a Cinemagraph I had to locate several tutorials and follow their instructions. I also looked up some youtube videos, though the ones featured on youtube did not have any of the shortcuts and featured long tedious steps I knew where not necessary for final output. Below are the links to the tutorials i both used and reference

http://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/how-to-make-a-cool-cinemagraph-image-in-photoshop

http://www.tested.com/tech/2253-how-to-make-your-own-cinemagraphs-a-new-take-on-gifs/

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/the-russell-brown-show/cinemagraphs/

http://cinemagraphs.com/

I used the above video to troubleshoot against the websites.

What NOT TO DO. Way too long and very tedious. 

My Cinemagraph

http://youtu.be/Gy_1_bk2-7w

Panorama

Panorama - It can fail be showing a bunch of nothingness or succeed by expanding interest in the image. A successful panorama demands a few key techniques.

• Panorama Head - For easy of stitching and reduces parallax error
• Interesting compositon - I found it more pleasing to stick to 'straight' landscape for my panoramas.
• Superlative Stitching - Failure here can ruin the image.
• Straight horizon - In a lot of pano's featuring a horizon is it imperative it stays straight and undistorted. 

Below are a few examples of the pano's I completed before submission, all were merged with photoshops photomerge. now to choose...

Night Pano. A bit too much sky in my opinion, a successful stitch and interesting buildings though

Middle of the day was a bad time to shoot bit the composition and subject matter are good in this one.

This is an example of a lot of boring space. It was also HDR'd and had potential, just incorrect composition

One of my favourites for colour and the composition, works in an abstract way.

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Below are my source files for the chosen panorama submission.

HDR Choices.

The HDR realm is much like a hole, a place you can get stuck for a very long time. I have been experimenting with HDR for quiet a long time using mostly photoshops HDR Pro. It has developed over the years but still remains in my opinion one of the worst ways to create a HDR. Perhaps i should rephrase. HDR Pro in photoshop has never had a very powerful deghost tool. If any clouds move, which they often do, you can be left with horrible artifacts you have to clone out later. I do not know if these problems were fixed in cs6 but my cs5 definitely displays them. I also experience severe darkening of my exposures. I was not impressed with its engine.

For this assignment i was hoping to get my hands on a new wide angled lens for my new camera body and photomatix. I had used the trial version of photomatix and found it to be superlative. As for the new lens, HDR's can look very striking when a lot of sky and a prominent foreground dominate the image. As i sold my old crop sensore wide angle lens and crop sensor body i was left with little choice to shoot this assignment. Unfortunately my lens didn't arrive on time and photomatix proved hard to get (for a student). So i used the technique we were shown in class using layers in conjunction with HDR Pro. Below are a few of my results.

Shot at about 200mm this is 7 exposures. The composition isn't great on this one but the colours are nice while not feeling overcooked. This was done completely manually in photoshop using layers. A very long process.

Looks like a pano but its just a HDR with the bottom and top cropped for more interesting compositions. It's subtle and works as per the brief, just have to get another persons opinion.

Another 7 exposure image. This one i used HDR pro for the sky and manually masked in the foreground. I like this image, it is a far off subject so the long tele focal length works and it was a great moment with the weather. David Flannigan suggested i amp up the colours a bit more but was still impressed with the overall subtleness of the hdr effect.

Using layer in photoshop this image took a very long time to create. Many ghosting issues and shooting into the sun made things very difficult. However i wanted the tree and the web in the image so was left with no choice. 

Yet another tele image (already explained) this image was don mainly using HDR Pro with a few tweaks in photoshop to get the whites looking nice. More about line and shape I do like the simplicity of this image.

I am happy with how this image turned out. Colours are vibrant without being in your face. Detail is good and a fairly nice composition. A combination of HDR Pro and layers was used to achieve total tonal range.

I hope to gain a little more technique with newer software as well as some advice on which image is the strongest to submit. Had fun doing this assignment!