Few months ago I posted my first impressions of the Everyday Messenger Bag. Today, after quite a lot of use of it, I will give you more thoughts on it, how it’s in general use and what I like, don’t like and what’s missing.

Using it

I found the Everyday Messenger to be very comfortable in normal use. I prefer shoulder bags and the wide strap is great in use. As I mentioned before, I had to take it off, together with the waist straps, and turn them around, to be able to use the bag on the left shoulder. But doing this was very easy and took only few minutes. A small clip to keep the straps shape where it’s attached would be really welcomed, but one can get by also without it.

The wide strap is great

A clip to keep the shape would be nice

Carrying a tripod

Carrying a tripod with the bag is easy, and my Gitzo fits perfectly. I ended up connecting the provided rubber band (which is used tho keep the tripod legs together) to the key strap, to avoid loosing it, and I also keep it in the place that is for the keys. I think it works better like this. I would probably loose the band by now if i didn’t do it like this.

Tripod attached to the bag

Attached rubber band

Capacity

The capacity is great when you are using one camera with up to three lenses in it (I mean full frame DSLR lenses, as those I use). I tried to put in more, but than the top ones are right on the edge of the bag, and I believe they could fall out when I open the flap. Secondly, having the lenses on top of each other makes taking them out much harder. For my last trip I needed to take 4 lenses and 2 camera bodies with me, and there was the Everyday Messanger Bag, just too small for it.

There are a lot of places for small items, but none for medium sized items. For instance, I ended up keeping the Formatt Hitech filters in the tablet pouch, but I had no space for the filter holder. In the end I bought a small bag for that, and I just keep it in the main compartment, which is not that great. I could keep it in the field pouch, but I don’t want to carry it just for that. I had the same problem with my last bag, and I still wish the creators would add an inside square bag, that would take up the space of one lens and could be closed off. Something the size of the lens pouches Sigma provides, just attached by velcro to the inside. .

Not much room for second row

I miss something like this

I also don’t understand why there is no way to simply attach the Field pouch to the outside of the bag. There are two attachments on the back of the pouch, so adding the opposite attachments to the cover of the Everyday messenger bag would probably be quite a small change and it would add to the capacity and usability quite a lot.

Back side

I carried the Surface Pro 4 in the computer space, and while it fits nicely, the whole area bulges out a little when the the bag is full, which I don’t like so much when there is a tablet inside. The whole back could be a bit more sturdier, for the bag to keep the shape better. Here is actually also my biggest problem with the bag. Since the back is not sturdy enough, it bends in one area regardless of how I carry it. This makes it sometime harder to unzip, and I fear it could lead to damage in the area after longer use. There is none by now, and I just hope it stays that way.

The back bulges out a bit

The bag bends in this area

Durability

I noticed no damage or manufacturing problems on my bag. All is as it was the first day I got it.

Overall

Even if this review maybe sounds more negative, don’t be mistaken, this is a great bag. I just went through the good parts more in the first impressions article. This is more what I observed during my use, and how it think this great bag could be made even better.

It’s currently my favorite bag, and I have no problems recommending it, as I think you will also like it. You can find more about it on the Peak Design website.

Please excuse the temporary downtime of the blog. I will be moving the blog to a new host in a few weeks, which should make problems like this a thing of the past. I would have done it right now, but I have 3 weeks of travel in front of me, so I have to deal with that first. But I hope there will be no more downtime until then, and all works as it should.

No new photo for today, but instead two new high-res wallpapers for you :) Still, since the 3440×1440 seems to be the most popular, here are two more in this one (but next time will add some other ones :)). As always, the new ones and all the older ones can be downloaded form the wallpapers page.

Today is the 6th year anniversary of my first post to this blog and actually also to the day I first created it. I haven’t started daily updates from the first day yet, but quite shortly afterwards :) A lot really has changed from that time, from the look of the blog, look of the photos, and also in my life, with me being able to take photos full-time. I never thought that that would happen when I started, and I still can’t believe it sometime :)

And to celebrate, I’m giving away 6 copies of my video tutorial series, Master exposure blending. So if you want one, just leave a comment on this post, and I will randomly choose from them in a week. And if you don’t know what to comment about, just say how you found about my blog or stumbled across it :)

And if you are curious, here is the photo I posted on the 4th March 2010

And this is how the page looked like than :)

There are many ways one can combine photos into panoramas, and while Lightroom does not provide many advanced features, it’s one of the easiest and fastest ways to do so. So today I will show you how to combine panoramas in Lightroom, and what to do to get best results.

So of course you first need to find the photos you want to combine into a panorama and have them imported into Lightroom (either use the File/Import dialog, or just drag and drop them o Lightroom when in Library view, and it will open automatically). To choose multiple photos, hold down Ctrl and click them one by one, when done, switch to the Develop module.

Creating a panorama

To make the panorama blend better, we need to remove vignetting from the photos, as that is not done automatically, and if kept, it can cause uneven color, and shadows, mostly in the sky. To do so, scroll down on the right side until you get to Lens Corrections, and check by Enable Profile correction. In case your lens is not automatically recognized (for instance, like me, you are using a reduction on your camera), you have to choose the profile manually. So choose Profile under Lens corrections, and there, choose the maker and type of you camera. I would suggest also checking Remove Chromatic Aberrations at the same time.

Btw. if you photos are crocked, don’t bother correcting this here. Lightroom will use the whole photo for the blend anyway.

Once this correction is applied, we need to synchronize it to all other used photos. Hit the Sync button in the bottom right, make sure that all values are checked, and than hit Synchronize. Now the photos are ready to be merged. Right click on one of them, either the big preview, or in the bottom photo strip (or you can go under Photo/Photomerge), choose Photomerge and choose Panorama.

The Panorama Merge Preview dialog will open. Here you can choose what kind of projections you would like (auto works mostly fine), if you would like to crop the result, and if you would like to apply Boundary warp. We will take a look at these in a moment. Once done, choose Merge.

The finished panorama will be loaded back into Lightroom, right next to the last of your selected photos (in few cases, I seen it appearing at the end of the photo strip). You now can select it, and continue with the edit.

There is one great thing about this result, and that it is still in RAW format (dng to be exact). So you still have all the dynamic range as you had in your files from the camera, you still can change the white balance, and so on. So you don’t really have to bother with doing any edits, except for the few corrections, on separated photos, and you can do it all on the finished panorama.

Please note, that this is not the best solution for HDR panoramas. In my experience, if I try to merge a set of brackets, lets say the 0EV series, and then another set, let say the +1EV series, the results will not line up perfectly, and you can’t use them as the source for tonemapping. For that, you can have a look at how to do it in PTgui or Autopano Giga.

Settings

Let’s go back to the settings in the Panorama Merge dialog. First you can choose the Auto select projection. This works fine most of the time, but not always. So better solution, is to choose the projection yourself. The selection is based on what photos you are trying to merge. The spherical projections, will try to put the photos on the inside of a sphere. This is best if you did a multi-row panorama, where you moved horizontally and also vertically while taking photos. The Cylindrical projection is best for one row panoramas, where you moved only in one direction. It will try to project the panorama on the inside of a cylinder. The Perspective projection is a special one, where it will only do perspective corrections on all the photos and so will try to put them together. The Perspective projection will sometime produce no result and you will be prompted to choose a different one.

This is and example, where exactly the Perspective projection works the best. From the two photos combined here, the bottom one was taken leveled, so without a perspective distortion. The top one was taken while looking up, so with huge perspective distortion. Ligtroom, will correct the top one, and so it’s able to merge them together.

Auto Crop will crop the picture so there is no white space around it. You can use it, or you don’t have to. Even if you use it, you still can open the crop tool later in Lightroom, and re-crop the image, as either way, it saves the whole image, not just the cropped part.

The last point is the Boundary warp slider, but since I wrote about that one recently, you can find more in this Boundary warp article.