“Photographers seeking the ‘good light’, going where everybody goes, aiming for an ideal, miss everything else.” — Erin Babnik1 Shooting and processing panoramas was difficult in the early- and mid-00’s.2 Hardware tools were few. A process tool was introduced by Adobe in 2001, but merge failure was frequent, and computer power was a stumbling block. […]
In the late 90’s, I seized on a tip from a Tim Fitzharris book,1 where he stated he used a 500mm f4 lens to photograph wildflowers. He reasoned this use would produce something different, so unlike the then-popular 4×5-inch large-format cameras. Different indeed. Different as well from a 100mm macro lens that grounded the passions […]
Sony A6700, 100-400mm f4.5-5.6 @ f5.6, ISO 1250, 1/250s Wildlife photography is forever changed with the advent of fast, accurate, eye-detect-focus mirrorless camera sensors. With bird-eye tracking enabled, the camera (usually) detects the eye, and follows the eye even if the eye exits the focus area. This is huge. It makes composition and sharp-in-the-eye image […]
Ursa Major charter yacht in Lituya Bay, Glacier Bay National Park, June, 2002, scan from Fujichrome Velvia. Following suggestions by Mark Galer, I built a film scanner using wood, cardboard, a 2” drill bit, a light table and a mirrorless camera. My intention was two-fold: scan curated color slides, and re-scan selects to compare with […]
I’m sitting in a kayak at the Sammamish River mouth on Lake Washington. Three hundred or so Common Mergansers flock nearby─in the slough fishing, roosting on the lake or flying in-between. The heavy birds fly at 40 mph up and down the tree-lined slough, a gauntlet that challenges the electronic viewfinder (EVF) and auto-focus of […]
Everything was going according to plan. At home, I consulted with www.stellarium.org for the Milky Way location, NOAA for cloud cover and Google Earth for orientation at Palouse Falls, WA. An October Milky Way shoot looked probable. I also checked the Palouse River stream gage, which was flowing above normal, not high but good enough. […]
My last post considered extracting stills from 4K video. A caveat I didn’t mention for many cameras─aside from the small file size─is rolling shutter. Background: To cope with the demands of video, cameras use an electronic, rather than mechanical, shutter. Shooting 4K, the electronic shutters produces frame rates of 24 or 30 fps, faster than […]
An underused advantage of shooting 4K video is in extracting serviceable stills. 4K produces good-quality 3840 x 2160 jpgs at 24 or 30 frames per second in many cameras, a faster frame-rate than the stills obtained from high-end dSLR’s or most mirrorless cameras. Some cameras can even shoot 4K at 60 f/s; the demands of […]
Photographically, September was a good month. In part this was due to The Photographer’s Ephemeris, a free and popular outdoor photographer planning software. I’ve written about Ephemeris before, in 2012. It’s since evolved to be web browser and app-based, no longer a desktop download. Below are two instances where The Photographer’s Ephemeris contributed hugely to […]
I enjoy creating panoramas, but I wasn’t excited about the new Adobe Lightroom 6 (and CC) Merge Panorama feature. I get great results from Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor), which creates pans from TIFs or JPGs at a quality better than I generally need. So why change? The case for Lightroom’s Panorama Merge are speed, […]