Capture PRO v2

I just received my Capture Pro from Peak Design. This was the second project I backed on Kickstarter, and the second one that delivered. It looks quite promising, and I really hope it works as suggested. I will be shooting at an event this weekend, so I will have a lot of time to try it out. I plan to write a review of it after that, so stay tuned :)

More info about this can be found here: Peak design , and here are few photos of it.

The bridge lions

At first I thought I will discard this photo. While I was taking it a group of people passed next to me, so the whole walkway on the left was one big ghost. But than I thought I would give it a try, as I really like the two lions here. So the result is a little darker than I usually prefer, but I still like it.

This is a manual blend from 7 shots. A little done using luminance masks and most just hand painted to blend the exposures.

Tweaks to the blog

Maybe some of you noticed, that there were few small changes recently to the blog. I’m tweaking it almost constantly, always trying to make it better. Recently there were two bigger changes. One is that I made the menu smaller (finally I found out where I have to edit the code to change it :)) and secondly I changed the way comments are handheld. As there were problems with people not being notified about comment replies on the blog, I was searching for a replacement. I thought about Facebook or G+, but in the end I decided for Disqus. It seems to fit the most and it lacks all the limitations of Facebook and G+. What do you think? Is it better?

The bridge arch

It’s so nice when you can get under a bridge. It gives you a great view of the bridge and for a lot of people its a view they never seen before. If you think about it, most people just cross the bridge, so they only see it from the bridge, or somewhere from the side. But never from under it.

This is a manual blend from 5 shots, taken in Maribor, Slovenia.

Another week has passed, another process post is here. For today I chosen a little older photo, one from start of this year (as you can easily see by the snow in it :)). As I no longer have the PSD file of it (I started keeping them only few weeks after I edited this one) I will go more into the overall steps I took to get it. So here goes.

First of all the finished photo itself. You can see, it’s quite a huge panorama, with dimensions of 19649 x 5237 which makes this photo around 120Mpix.

You can view a zoomable version of this panorama in the Panorama section on this blog, or directly here.

I knew I wanted this photo fro a long time before I took it, as this is the best view of Bratislava. I was just missing the needed equipment. But sometime before I took it, I bought the Nodal Ninja 4 panoramic head. And with the help of it, I could make this pano without any problem. Here is the setup I was using:

So it was my Canon 5D mark II, with the Canon 16-35mm lens, wired remote, the bubble level all on the Nodal ninja 4 head.

Overall I took 8 shots, all 6 bracket series. I imported them all into Lightroom, where I did few minor corrections. First of all I enabled lens correction. This is very important when doing a panorama, as it removes the vignetting from the photo and so helps it to be blended more seamlessly. I also removed the chromatic aberrations and corrected white balance in Lightroom.

After that I exported all the 48 images as 16bit Tiff files and loaded them into PTgui. I merged them into a panorama and saved as their separate blended planes (check out my HDR panoramas tutorial for a more detailed explanation)

After that I used Bridge to load all the files into one Photoshop file as separate layers. You can do this also manually, file by file, but using Bridge is much faster.
In Photoshop I blended the images, and corrected the angle. As I said, I haven’t saved the file, so no screenshot here, but instead here is a piece of the panorama taken from the 50% zoom

and from a 100% zoom.

Continue to the full post to see two of the original 0EV exposures.

The contest and the giveaway is over, you can view the winners page later today.

Thanks to Oloneo software I have for you another round of my editing contest. Again you get a chance to win a copy of their great HDR editing program Oloneo Photoengine. If you don’t know Photoengine, I really suggest you try it out, as it’s one of the simplest and best HDR editing programs available. You can also see in a lot of my recent photos, that I used it to create the initial blended images, as it creates a very natural look.

You can find all the information on Oloneo and their products here: http://www.oloneo.com/en/page/home.html
and you can find a trial version you can try right away here: http://www.oloneo.com/en/page/download_form.html?product_id=pe1&type=trial
(there is no Mac version available, but you can run it in a virtual machine)

So when you are done playing with it, here is how you can enter the contest:

How to join the contest

1. read the complete rules first :)
2. download the provided series of brackets showing the Tower bridge in London from here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ouao6bfobixehg2/diwbjyEIze
3. edit them into a final HDR photo (you can use any software and any technique, tone-mapping, blending, exposure fusion, black&white version)
4. join the contest event here http://www.facebook.com/events/387337638066274/ and post your photo into the event or send the final edit to me, under miroslav.petrasko@gmail.com with the subject “HDRshooter contest”

Only one entry per person is permitted. Please don’t use parts of any other than the provided photos. If you post your photo to the event page, you can delete your submission and upload a new one. If there is more than one from a person, the last one is entered, all other will be deleted.

There will be two winners in this contest, booth of them receiving a download copy of Oloneo Photoengine.

1st winner will be selected by a jury of great HDR photographers, Jimmy Mcintyre from ThroughStrangeLens, Daniel Cheong from Daniel Cheong photography and Anthony Gelot from A.G. Photographe.

2nd winner will be selected by fans on Facebook, where everyone can vote for their favorites, once all the entries have been submitted. This voting is not in the event.  Sharing of your entries further to promote them is permitted, but entries with fake likes will be disqualified.

The latest time to submit you entry is 1st December 2013 at midnight. The voting on the winner will be held during the week from 2nd to 8th December on the HDRshooter facebook page.
I hope you will all have fun editing and good luck to you all :)

Join the raffle

And a little surprise :). For all those of you, who don’t have time to edit, or just don’t have the software, and still would like to win a copy of the Photoengine, there is an option for you. Just join the raffle (you need to enter a name and an email address for that) and fulfill any of the conditions. If you want to have a bigger chance, you can fulfill them all :). The raffle ends at the same time as the editing competition.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I reserve the right to change or amend the competition rules at any time without prior notice. By entering the competition, entrants agree to be bound by these rules. All participants can’t use the final photo for any commercial use and have to give credit to me as the original author, also I will not use their versions for any purposes other than promotion of this competition. Participants can share the photo on their FB, blog, flickr or other accounts, but still have to give me credit as the author and link back to the contest.

And a little something to inspire you :). This is a version created only in Oloneo Photoengine. Took me about 3 minutes to get it to this stage. You can try it yourself in the Trial version.

Photo organization

How do you organize your photos? I prefer to use Lightroom for this. It’s great for quick edits and for RAW corrections. Still I have to do a lot of cleaning in my database, as it’s same as with everything else. When one does not organize everything right away, it starts to pile up and get a little overwhelming. My lightroom currently indexes around 100 000+ photos and I know, when I start to clean it up, I could delete at least 30-50% of them. But this will take a long time.

I also quite like the way Trey Ratcliff handles his photos. He describes it in his ebook Digital Workflow for Photographers and I really want to implement it. But for now I’m still struggling a bit. Will have to do the clean up first :)

On the pier

I went out today, hoping to get some new photos. Whole Bratislava is covered by a very heavy fog, so I thought a view from a higher place could look quite interesting. But no luck for me. The two highest spots in the city were not accessible. On the castle fortification they started a renovation project, so they are fenced off and on top of the SNP bridge was a private party. So no nice views for me. So I chosen another photo from this beautiful sunset at the lighthouse in Austria. Btw. don’t forget to visit this blog tomorrow, as there will be a little different post :)

This is a manual blend from 6 shots, created in Photoshop.