I took this photo on Sunday, by the Relaxxx building in Petrzalka. It’s not that bad, but I do miss more balance in this photo. There were this crazy huge clouds on the right side, which of course disappeared right as I got some nice light.

I’m including a behind the scenes shot today, to show you how I used part of the Nodal Ninja 4, to get a nice panorama shot.

Btw.. isn’t it funny, that in this building is a fitness center on the top floors and a drive through KFC on the bottom :)

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 2*5, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 16-35mm F2.8, Focal length: 16mm, Aperture: 16, Middle exposure time: 6.0s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.13123, 17.11672

Guide update

Some time ago I posted a guide on how to create a cityscape reflection in Photoshop, and today I updated it also with a video version. You can visit it to see it video, or do it right here :) Compared to the written tutorial, I also added a second way of blurring the reflection, for a little different look :)

Amsterdam canals

More and more and more panoramas. The more I get into my photos, the more I want to get there. And panos just looks so great on a huge screen :)

So here is another panorama, taken in Amsterdam. This is a 2 tile 4 exposure panorama.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 2×4, Camera Model: Canon EOS 5D mark II, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 24mm, Aperture: 6.3, Middle exposure time: 20s, ISO: 200, Tripod used: yes, Location: 52.36671, 4.884720

Let’s continue with another panorama. With all the photos I took from the Bratislava Castle over the years, I think I never did one from this exact spot. And with the a7R it’s just so nice and detailed :)

This is a 2 tile pano, each tile form 3 exposures. I did blend them manually, as the base exposure covered much of the dynamic range, and only few lights needed to be recovered, and the trees were too dark. Other than that, I quite liked the camera result on it’s own.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 2*3, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 70mm, Aperture: 7.1, Middle exposure time: 6.0s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.14124, 17.09981

Modular backpack

I came across this quite interesting approach to a camera backpack on Kickstarter. Instead of going with multiple sizes for different situations, this one offer modularity, where you can split the backpack into multiple. It’s nice to see new trends in camera backpacks, like modularity, lens cap holders and similar.

You can find more about it here, on their Kicstarter page.

Rolling greens

One more photo from the green hills. Funny how different this is to my normal photos. The simplicity and minimalism of it is just refreshing. And I had nothing to correct at all in Photoshop :)

Technique: Lightroom edit, Number of exposures: 1, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 70-200mm F2.8 IS II, Focal length: 175mm, Aperture: 13, Middle exposure time: 1/5s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.97406, 17.05052

Today I will show you a program I like to use when I quickly need to compress my photos. I don’t use it for the photos I post daily, as those are compressed very little, but I use it all the time for the blog parts, like the slide-show, or thumbnails, or when I need to send a lot of previews at once.

So here is the program I use. It’s called Caesium Image Compressor. It’s a free program, that even includes a portable version, so you don’t even have to install it. It can be downloaded from Caesium’s site here.

The interface gives you a lot of buttons, but I actually use only three things. I set the quality in the bottom left, choose same folder as input in the bottom right and hit compress. It will automatically add _compressed to the new file name, so this makes it were quick to work with.

And here are two comparisons of the results (view full size by clicking on them). Both are compressed from a 100% jpg to a 80% quality in Caesium. You can see the respective file sizes under them.

1.36 MB

284 KB

1.12 MB

239 KB

Btw. to get the same file size when using the Photoshop save for web dialog, I had to lower the quality to 45-50%.