HDRshooter

Austria

High up in the Alps

November 13, 2018 No Comments

High up in the Alps

I do like these huge panoramas. And the more I take them, the more I like them. I even vent back in my photo archive to find even more panoramas :)

This one I took in 2015 while visiting the Grossglockner High Alpine Road in Austria. This is a road that can get you very high up into the Alps, for just a stunning view. Of course you have to be lucky for the clouds to move away, or you will see nothing. Or as the day I was there, the clouds were first covering everything, but after lunch they moved and showed this beautiful view of the mountains.

This photo is a 66Mpix panorama, created from three exposures. Merged in Lightroom, then finished in Photoshop. I did take multiple exposures here, but did not use them in the end. Not sure if it was the wind or bad tripod placement, but few of the exposures would not align properly and instead of trying to fix that, was just easier to edit a single exposure.

High up in the Alps, Grossglockner High Alpine Road, Austria

And here are few details:

Bratislava, Slovakia

Passing winter tram

November 12, 2018 No Comments

Best books

Yesterday I updated you on my reading list, and I forgot to mention one great source to find great books. Each year, Goodreads has Choice awards for the best books. And right now the 2018 ones are slowly reaching the final winners. I always have a look at them, to find some great book. Only yesterday I found The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton as one of the nominees, and I’m already half way through :) If you want a good book to read, I would have a look there.

Passing winter tram

While browsing my photo archive, I stumbled also across this photo. And as I never posted it here before, here it is :) I actually took this one on the first January of 2017. It’s one of those perfect dates when to take photos. That, and the week between Christmas and New Years, are the times when there are very few people in the city centers. Everybody is at home or with their families, which makes the city a photographers playground. Each time I can I go out to take some photos.

This photo is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Bratislava, Slovakia

In the fog

November 11, 2018 No Comments

Reading list

Been a while since I did a reading list update, so i will do one now :) Recently I got through 6 books, three fiction and three nonfiction. Let’s start with the nonfiction ones.

Somehow the three nonfictional book were all with the same subject. Skepticism and critical thinking. Each one just look at a different thing to by critical about. The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe by Steven Novella, Bad Science by Ben Goldacre and Paranormality by Richard Wiseman. All are very interesting to go through and are worth a read (or listen :))

From the fiction part, I was quite disappointed by the Elevation by Stephen King. Just an interesting premise with no payoff at the end. The other two Inner Space by Merlin Fraser and The Others by Jeremy Robinson were quite better stories, even if not as developed as they should be.

Have not yet decided what to listen to next, but will update once I got through few of them :)

In the fog

There has not been much snow in Bratislava the last few years, but what we have a lot of is fog. And the season for for is slowly already starting. Not that much yet. This shot is not from this year, but from 2016. I do think though, I will get some new ones soon :)

For this photo, I used two exposures. Blended in Photoshop, to get the brightness of the lights a bit down. Photos like this one are not that easy to edit, as one can easily crate a really strong color banding. But there are ways to get rid of it, and you can see my guide on that here.

This photo is not a panorama, I cropped it to this aspect. Usually I don’t do that, and keep the standart 3:2 aspect ratio, but slowly I’m warming more and more to the idea to give a photo the aspect it just fits the best. No longer keeping to the classic one. Probably from doing so many panoramas and vertoramas that are not in the classic aspect, I got used to it.

In the fog, Bratislava, Slovakia, SNP bridge

Switzerland, Zermatt

In the mountains

November 10, 2018 No Comments

In the mountains

After the yesterdays city photo, how about we go back into the nature with the today’s one. I went back into my huge photo library (my Lightroom catalog show that it’s over quarter million, exactly 276 733 photos :)) and selected a photo I took under the Matterhorn in 2014. Funny how it still feels like only yesterday.

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop. It’s takne in the area round Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps. Matterhorn is a bit to the left of this view.

In the mountains, Zermatt, Alps, Switzerland

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Almas Tower

November 9, 2018 No Comments

Vertical monitor

Not long ago I posted a photo of my work-space, and you may have noticed I have two monitors. One horizontal and one vertical. I never liked having more than one monitor before, but I have to say, the vertical one can be so useful.

Even if I don’t use it for anything else than browsing the web. It’s just perfect for that. Now that most things are formatted for mobile, having a vertical monitor just gives you such a great view of things.

And today, when I was editing today’s vertorama, it was even better. On my ultra-wide monitor the photo was just so tiny when I wanted to see it fully. But on the vertical one, it worked perfectly. Here you can see a screenshot from Lightroom. This is how it looked like when I was editing this photo of the Almas tower (this screenshot was taken before I edited the photo in Photoshop, so that’s why it looks different than the finished one).

What do you use? A single or a multi-monitor setup?

Almas Tower

Today’s photo is a really tall one :) But the Almas tower is also really tall, so it fits. The Almas tower is right in the middle of Jumeirah lake towers area, near the Dubai Marina in Dubai. It’s really hard to miss due to the star shaped bottom. There is no other tower that looks like this.

I was standing on a balcony of a nearby skyscraper when taking this and I really wanted a photo of the whole tower. And I also wanted to get minimal distortion here. My widest lens, the 12mm Laowa was just not wide enough to get the whole tower into the shot, and I did not want to use a fisheye. So I went with a vertorama. I used the 17mm tilt shit and took three shots.

But even so, I could not get the whole tower into the picture. I was still missing the top. So here I did something I do in cases like this one. I first took the three shots I was able to get while shifting the lens up and down. Then, I shifted the lens as high as I could, and I tilted the camera up, until I got the whole top in the shot. Like this, the top photo will be distorted, but as the whole bottom part of the vertorama would be straight, I could correct that in post processing.

I used here 4 shots, each one from three exposures. Normally, I would combine this in PTgui, but that refused to put them together properly. So instead I used the new function in Lightroom, the HDR panorama one. It combined the shots really well, as you can see. I still had to correct few moving cars and people, but not much. In the end, I got a 80mpix image (the PSB was 5.8GB :)) that I’m really happy with :)

And here are few details: