It’s a bit hard to get a new view of a classic subject. And one of the options is to try to change the foreground. So for this shot of the Eiffel tower, I went quite close to this plant (I have no idea what it is :)) and tried to fill most of it with it. Of course I also did a vertorama, as I would not get the whole tower otherwise. I think it worked out quite nicely.
This is a three shot vertorama, combined in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop.
I just got a new toy to play with, the Xiaomi MiJia 360° Sphere Panoramic Camera. This is quite a nice 360 camera, with a total resolution of 24Mpix. I already did few test shots with it, but nothing sharable yet, but I do plan to take it with me for my photo trips, so there may be some more 360 photos on the blog in the future.
The quality is of course not as when one uses a DSLR, but it’s just so much easier to take a 360 photo with this. I’m currently experimenting with blending the photos from it, as I would prefer not to be in them (you know, I take one shot, move, and then take a second shot and then finish it by blending them together :)). And while I have some issues with alignment, I think I’m close to a solution there :)
For todays photos, I chosen a vertorama I took last summer in Lyon in France. This fountain is in the middle of the Place des Jacobins there. Lyon is quite a nice city, with really many great photos spots, to bad that I was there in the middle of the August, and it was just crazy hot. For the week there I seen almost no clouds at all, and the sun was just burning the life out of me. Still, I got some nice evening shots :)
This is a two shot vertorama. I too 5 exposures for every shot, as the fountain was quite bright. I combined the shots in PTgui, than combined into HDR using Oloneo Photoengine, and finished up in Photoshop. Modst of the shot is not HDR, I blended in parts of the original shots for most of it, but it was much easier to start from HDR than from scratch.
So not that long ago, I updated my PC. The new one is a 4Ghz i7, 32GB of RAM and a 1080GTX graphic card. And if you wonder that that made Lightroom more usable, I have bad news for you. It’s as bad as it was before. Slow, choppy, takes long to open photos and even longer to activate tools. If I export anything, the cpu goes to 100% and even the mouse cursor stops, as it takes every bit of power it can get from the PC.
I have no idea what Adobe did, or if they really want people to stop using Lightroom, but I’m on the verge of getting rid of it. Will give them one more update, if it’s still the same, it’s gone.
Strangely, no such problems with Photoshop. I can have huge photos with many layers open, and it still works fine.
I really like when I get a nice color contrast in a photo. And the most common one you can get is between blue and yellow. And it just works so nice.
Same here, with this morning photo taken in Paris at the Eiffel tower. It’s like the city standing still, while the street moves.
I could not resit few weeks ago when I saw the surface dial in a store in Austria. I really nicely compliment the Surface Ergonomic Keyboard I use right now. Too back that the support for it in Photoshop is really lackluster right now.
I will use it for a while more, and they I try and put together a little review for the blog. Stay tuned :)
For today, I have for you another photo from the American cemetery in Normandy. For this time, I was shooting right into the sun, to give a nice contrast to the shadows that the graves made on the ground. Taking photos directly into the sun sometimes works quite well, sometimes the photo is a disaster. I think here it worked out quite OK.
This is a two show vertorama, with the top photo being from two exposures.
As it’s the 4th of July today, some of you will probably try to get some fireworks shots. And this is just a small reminder, that all the newsletter subscribers get a free ebook from me on Capturing Fireworks. Just scroll down any page on the blog to find the subscribe field, or go to the ebook page here.
With the slow demise of Nik plugins, Macphun is slowly evolving into the go to plug-ins for photo editing. And for the next two days they are offering a 10 usd dolars discount on everything they offer. Check more on their Macphun website here.
I had another shot ready from Portugal for today, but I thought I will post it tomorrow instead, as it’t another panorama. So I chosen a vertorama for today. This one is of course of the Eiffel tower in Paris.
I wanted to hide the big amount of people here (you can still see them a bit on the bottom right) and have this nice patch of blue flowers in the foreground. So I put my camera really low to the ground, to get closer and that also took vertorama, to get the full Eiffel tower in the shot.
This is a vertorama from two exposure, combined in Lightroom, edited in Photoshop.
