Yearly Archives: 2010

Riding

Photographs

You either get it or you do not.

My right wrist is shot.

My gluteus maximus* (aka my left bottom muscle) is stressed to an extent that makes me walk with a limp.

And my neck is so far gone that a look over my shoulder makes paying taxes seem like fun.

In other words, I have been riding an old motorbike in the twisties and couldn’t be happier. What’s wrong with a couple of aspirin and some internal bleeding, after all?

And when I say ‘old motorbike’ I suppose I really should write ‘old BMW motorcycle’ because that’s the only brand that speaks to me. And when I say ‘BMW motorcycle’ I really should write ‘BMW motorcycle with an air cooled, twin cylinder motor’ because like the Leica M2 and M3, they simply do not make them like that any more. A minimum of what you need, promising a maximum of its potential if you rise to the occasion.

So if you don’t ride, get with the action, take some lessons, learn what your sense of smell is really about (bikes have no air conditioning or air filters so you smell where you are, if you get my drift) and stop reading this. But be sure to take a camera.

Here’s where my bike took me for breakfast today.

1989 BMW R100RT at Alice’s Restaurant this morning.
Panasonic LX1.

* Two of the words in the Latin vernacular known to any schoolboy repeatedly caned for misbehavior in the English public school system.

Point Sur lightstation

Architecture

On Highway One.

Go a few miles south of Carmel on California’s Highway One and you will reach a desolate windy stretch of the world’s most beautiful road to which abuts a rock which is home to the Point Sur lightstation.

It’s no exaggeration to say that I have been trying to take a half decent snap of this majestically situated relic for some two decades now. First, I can never resist the call of One and while I much prefer to take in that magical highway on a motorcycle, that form of conveyance is ill suited to carrying the sort of gear needed to do Point Sur justice.

On my most recent attempt I was actually visiting One to take some virtual reality panoramas at Point Lobos, just outside Carmel, but could not resist the short drive down to Big Sur, passing Point Sur en route.

The problem with photographing Point Sur is that it’s far away, the gates are always locked, you can’t get a good view of it from close-up, it’s windy as all get up and the place, when not shrouded in mist, is enveloped in sea haze. But this time I came prepared. With monopod and tripod and with that killer duo, the Canon 5D and the Canon 400mm f/5.6 L telephoto. The latter, while huge and unwieldy, is by a considerable margin the best 400mm lens I have used and will likely remain so because the next step up is Canon’s f/4 and f/2.8 variants and I have more sense than the money demanded for these.

To cut a long story short, I banged away from the roadside, over the fence, with the hardware neatly supported on a monopod, trying not to sway in the heavy wind. The long Canon lens does not make matters easier by offering a lot of barrel for the wind to push on. I left the lens fully open as it gets no sharper stopped down and because I wanted the shortest possible shutter speed at the optimal ISO 400 setting on the 5D’s grainless sensor. The image was made in RAW format, of course, as I knew a lot of post processing would be needed to bring up the tones and contrast, experience having taught me it is very hard to destroy the quality of a 5D RAW image no matter how much you tweak things.

Well, here she is. I can still do better and propose to spend another 20 years trying, but this will have to do for now. The camera was maybe a mile from the buildings.

Point Sur lighstation. Canon 5D, 400mm, 1/3000, f/5.6, ISO400, processed heavily in Lightroom 3.

Here’s the original – let me tell you that even with a monopod it’s a challenge holding this rig level in heavy wind.

Original.

To read more about Point Sur click here, bought to you by us California taxpayers who are largely refused entry to this special place.

An awesome viewfinder

Micro Four-Thirds

The G1 finder shines.

Just how good the electronic viewfinder in the mirrorless Panasonic G1 really is was brought home forcefully to me when I spent a couple of days snapping away on the central California coast earlier this week. I had with me both the Canon 5D and the G1 and was reminded time and again why I prefer the EVF in the G1 to the traditional mirror/prism construction of the 5D.

The EVF in the G1 is not perfect, true. In bright light it will wash out highlights immediately, but no matter how bright the light you will have no difficulty reading the display data – aperture, shutter speed, etc. But things get even better in poor light. In the image below, the light was exceedingly poor – look at the exposure data. Yet the EVF adapted the image to show it in daylight brightness – much as you see it here – and composition was a breeze. In this sort of lighting you can actually read the Canon 5D’s display data, which is nice, but the G1’s is every bit as clear plus you get to see what you are photographing which, for photographers, is a nice feature ….

Inside Mission Carmel, CA. G1, 9-18mm Olympus MFT lens at 18mm, 1/8, f/5.6, ISO 1600.

I was lucky to get away with it at 1/8th second hand held and even at ISO 1600 there is no shortage of detail.

The Mission Carmel was founded June 3, 1770 and includes a working K-8 school. It is about as spectacular an example of California Mission architecture as you will find and quite beautifully maintained. Recommended, regardless of your religious views, or lack thereof.

Virtual reality revisited

Panoramas

Better tools and some thoughts on Flash.

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I have decided to do some new work in Virtual Reality panoramas, having written extensively in these pages about the technique some four years ago. Snow Leopard refuses to let either PTMac – the software used to stitch the constituent images – or CubicConverter – which converts the stitched panorama into Virtual Reality format – work, so my first port of call was to ace panoramic pro UK photographer Rod Edwards. Rod has got this technique down and one of the most stunning examples of VR I have seen is his panorama of the famous Racetrack in California’s Death Valley which can be seen by clicking here.

Following Rod’s advice I settled on PTGui for stitching and Pano2VR for VR generation. Processing VR panoramas is a two step process – first stitch the constituent images into a seamless flat whole, then convert that image into a circular panorama which the viewer can pan at will in all directions, not to mention the ability to zoom in and out.

In the process I learned a couple of things. First, the software is now friendlier than before, though the Panotools engine used by PTGui seems identical to that used by the obsolete PTMac. Second, Pano2VR is an excellent tool making it easy to add sound, navigation controls and copyright data. But, most importantly, I learned how superior Adobe’s Flash is to Apple’s Quicktime. Yes, Pano2VR can generate VR files in either format. The Flash versions are half the size and offer far more control. Panning in Flash panoramas is also much smoother than the jerky alternative in Quicktime. Yes, the very same Flash which greedy piggy Steve Jobs has banned from the iPad. It’s ironical that Quicktime VR is no longer supported by Apple’s own latest version of their media player, QuickTime X, as they appear to be abadoning the VR format. But you don’t expect Apple to tell you that now, do you?

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So to play a jerky Quicktime VR pano you have to download the older Quicktime 7 if it’s not on your system. Let’s hope the anti-trust powers stomp on Jobs’s arrogance and force him to open the iPad to Flash. If not, the competition will see to it in any case, and I’ll be first in line for a tablet which plays Flash and has a built in SDXC card reader. What a jerk! Here’s a guy who has a monster ego and a huge vendetta against Adobe for some reason. A little power is a dangerous thing ….

As a quick proof of concept, I snapped six pictures of a loft interior using the Canon 5D and Canon fisheye lens mounted vertically on the King Pano panoramic head. The excellent King Pano remains available and I recommend it. You do not need a fisheye to use it but a fisheye lens is the way to go if you want to do 360 degree Virtual Reality panoramas. Even with regular lenses, the King Pano is immensely useful as it provides the correct nodal point offset for the camera, meaning your efforts to stitch images properly will be speedily rewarded. Determination of the right setting for rotation of your rig about your lens’s nodal point is not that hard, and well explained in many places on the web, including on this site.

As proof of concept, click on the picture below. I have added some Vivaldi to jolly things along and the whole thing takes a minute or so to download. I did not bother using HDR, though that technique is highly recommended in VR work owing to the huge dynamic range frequently encountered – look at the burned out windows as an example. HDR fixes that. Nor did I fill the zenith and nadir holes, concentrating on the core stitching functionality instead. So next week it’s off to Point Lobos to do the real thing. In the image below I used TIFF files for maximum definition and you are looking at the Flash version.

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Click to load and play the panorama. Use the mouse to navigate in all directions.
Will NOT play on an iPad.

To view a selection of my earlier panoramas, please click here. These use Quicktime7.

Disclosure: No connection to, or investment in, any of the companies mentioned in this article.

Adobe Photoshop Express

iPad, Software

A useful iPad app.

I’m not sure what they are putting in the water coolers at Adobe Labs HQ in San Francisco, but they should definitely stick with the program.

First we got a really value added, fairly priced upgrade to Lightroom 3, many of whose enhancements I have written about here – film grain, superior RAW conversions, outstanding flexibility to remove lens aberrations and distortions – and now, at no cost, an iPad app named Adobe Photoshop Express.

The price is right!

It’s an inspired piece of programming which really ‘gets’ the touchscreen interface and one of the best efforts yet to make the iPad into a photo processing platform. Sure the controls are limited – basic exposure, sharpness, effects, frames, monochrome conversions and so on – but all the ‘sliders’ for the controls dictate that the user merely slides his finger across the screen to change things. Surely this is the future of photo processing? Further, sign up at Adobe and if you can get comfortable with access rights (theirs not yours) to your pictures, then you can sync your snaps to your desktop or laptop via their servers.

Here’s a simple snap of our son with a neat frame added – this is a screen shot as I do not have an Adobe online storage account:

Winston at Point Lobos. My ‘equipment man’.

Very worth while looking into and it seems some of the earlier bugs have been stomped on as I have had no issues with my version. And what have you got to lose?