Night traffic in LA

Let’s stay in Los Angeles with another photo today. And no, it’s not a panorama for a change. This time, it’s a vertorama! I just can’t fit everything I want to capture into a single photo. Maybe I just like having a different view from everyone else.

This photo was taken in downtown Los Angeles from the 4th Street overpass. I first tried shooting it with the 10mm Laowa lens (I’ll write about that one sometime later), but filling the frame with everything I wanted at 10mm wasn’t that easy. In the end, I made a vertorama using my 17mm tilt-shift lens. It’s still wide, but it fits the view so much better.

A busy night view of Los Angeles

But let’s get to the photograph. This is another two-shot panorama, taken from the front balcony of the Griffith Observatory. The longest lens I had with me was my Sony 24–105mm, so I couldn’t zoom in as much as I would have liked. Instead, I went wide and tried to capture as much of the city as possible.

And I certainly managed that! The downside is that the photograph looks a little busy, without any particularly distinct elements to draw the eye. I’ve taken similar photographs in Prague and Dubai, but in those cases, there was something to break up the cityscape like a lake or a major highway running through the middle of the frame. Here, there was no such obvious focal point, so the city lights spread across the entire panorama. But it looks especially good when viewed large. You can explore all the little details and never know what you might discover.

Tunnel View in Yosemite National Park

I didn’t know what to edit first, so how about Tunnel View in Yosemite National Park? You can find the spot on the map, where it’s simply named Tunnel View. The view was just stunning, though a bit hazy. Still, I got past all the tourists taking selfies there and managed to grab a panorama shot.

This is a three-shot panorama, with each shot blended from three exposures. I mainly used the extra exposures to open up the shadows a bit and tone down the bright clouds. I might have played with it even more, but my Mac mini M4 Pro was struggling here. Doing panoramas from the 60 MP Sony A7R V photos is no easy task. Maybe in the future, I’ll have to split my editing a bit to keep the number of layers down. Still much to learn about getting the most out of the Sony camera.

Usual panorama

Of course, while getting used to the new camera, I had to take a panorama. It’s crazy how quickly you end up with huge resolutions when using a 61 MP camera. This one, a simple two-shot panorama, is already 13,000 × 6,000 pixels.

Actually, all my recent updates now include much larger photos than before. Regular shots are now 2560 px wide, while panoramas are 5120 px wide. So click on the photos only if you don’t mind loading a file that’s a few megabytes in size :)

This is another shot of Bratislava Castle, a two-shot panorama, with each shot blended from three exposures. Again, this was mostly done to tone down the brightness of the castle and the new construction below it

Back at the Castle

To try out the new setup, I went out yesterday to take a few photos. Since I hadn’t been to the area around the castle in a while, I decided to head there. It’s changing quite a bit. With new construction right under the castle (modern, luxurious houses that, in my opinion, don’t really fit the area) it’s getting busier every day. I’m curious to see how it will look once everything is finished.

This is a blend of three exposures, though most of the image comes from a single one. As with most shots of Bratislava Castle, the additional exposures were needed to tone down the brightness of the castle.