New products from Peak Design

Peak Design is by now a well know company that creates high quality camera bags, backpacks and accessories. And each time the come with something new, they do it through Kickstarter, as that’s where they had their start. And they doing it again today, with their new products. So if you find them interesting, now it’s the time to get them, as the Kickstarter price is quite lower than the final retail price. You can find the Kickstarter page here.

So what’s new? A Travel line, made specialy for traveling, consisting of:

Travel Backpack 45L

A quite a big travel backpack, made in a more modular design than other Peak Design products. You can use it as a normal backpack, or use the camera and packing cubes to change the inside of it. With the camera cube you can made it more into a camera backpack. The retail price should be 299.95 USD, with the Kickstarter price being 235 USD

Camera and Packing cubes

These cubes are meant to be used with the Travel Backpack, where you use them to change the inside of the bag. You can do different configurations here.

Tech and Wash Pouch

And to finish it off Peak design also introduced two smaller pouches, one specifically designed for smaller tech items, and one for hygienic items.

You can find more photos and information, as well as pricing on the Kickstarter page here.

(all photos courtesy of Peak Design)

Wide view from Paris

And another panorama. This one is from my visit to Paris last year. I took it quite early in the morning, right before the sunrise. As you can see, the blue hour was quite nice, but since it was really cloudy, the sunrise was not so much.

This is a two shot panorama, combined in Lightroom, edited in Photoshop.

And here are few details:

Panoramas

Did you know that there are zoomable versions of huge panoramas I took available on the blog? Just head over to the Panoramas section, choose the one you like, and zoom in as much as you want :)

Windmill on the Moulin Rouge

I really like the look on the windmill on the mouling rouge. It give the building such a distinctive look. You can mistake it for nothing else :)

This photo is a two shot blend, one for the base, second one to brighten the shadows a bit. Edited in Lightroom, blended in Photoshop.

Handheld photos

I hate it when I have to take landscape/cityscape photos handheld. Rather I really like to take my time, setup the camera, do manual focusing and take the exact photo I want. I especially noticed when I stated using a tripod first time, that the composition of my photos got better. Just the forced slowdown made me think more of what I’m doing. I also ended up less photos in the end.

So how would you get a better handheld photo? Here are few tips, for that.

1. Hold your camera close. The closer you hold the camera to your body, the less change you will move your hands while taking the photo.
2. If you can, place the camera on something. Having a support of any kind will help you keep the camera steady.
3. Higher ISO instead of bigger aperture. Think of it this way, you can de-noise a photo, you can’t sharpen a out of focus one. Just don’t overdo it.
4. Under expose your photo. With the current cameras, you can easily overexpose a photo by 1 to 2 stops, sometimes even more. So underexposing a shot by having a shorter exposure, and then overexposing it after in post-processing, can really help you.
5. Repeat the shot multiple times. The more photos you take, the bigger chance one of them will be good.
6. Use a timer. I noticed when I take handheld photos, that when I press the shutter I push on the camera and so move it down a bit. This can be a problem. So instead, I turn on the 2s timer, and I just hold the camera, so it does not move when it’s recording the photo.
7. Forget about bracketing. Rather just do multiples of the same photo. You can get most from one RAW anyway in most situations and I jet to see anyone with such steady hands that can hold the camera for so long (but maybe you are an exception? :)).

Still if you doing a landscape or a cityscape shot, I would go with a tripod every-time, even in the middle of a sunny day :)

Sunny day panorama from Paris

And while on the topic on handheld photos, here is one. When you go to Paris, to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, you will notice that the use of any tripods of any kind is not allowed up there. So the only thing you can really do, is to shoot handheld.

So I was there during a quite sunny day, and this is one of the photos I got. For this sunny day panorama, I did two shots, combined in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop.

If you need tips on where to take photos in Paris, check out this Top Photography spots list.

And here are few details: