Sometimes it’s good to take a second try at a favorite photo with a different approach in post-processing. Here, I tried some a B&W conversion on one of my favorite shots from this year’s trip to London. The gold and blue combination is nice in color, but patterns and lines really take over in B&W.

Here are two more from London, taken around St. Paul’s Cathedral. These required fairly sizeable stitch/panoramas since I got "caught" with a 50mm lens in fairly tight quarters and had to make a virtual wide angle. The second one is a 14 frame (4 + 5 + 5) broom-sweep pattern composite.

St. Paul’s alley

St. Paul’s Cathedral

Over at Flickr they’re telling me the 2nd shot I posted yesterday is fantastic.

Since I had just done a quick 6 frame stitch to achieve it and knew the result wasn’t optimum, I reworked the post-processing: corrected White balance; applied different tone curve (D2XMODE1); adjusted levels to improve contrast; corrected perspective (so that Big Ben isn’t the tower of Pisa); and cloned to eliminate reflections from the Eye’s pod.

While I was at it, I worked on another stitched image (this one only 2 frames) of the London Eye:

Some of you may have known I was going to be "on location." During past travel, I’ve been very tempted to turn the trip into a photoshoot, hunting down as many "fine art" candidates for my portfolio as I can find. I don’t know what it was this time, whether the bad weather that ranged from bleak to blah, or the lack of inspiration I’ve had lately for this type of photography, or my emphasis on enjoying the company of my travel companion, but I don’t feel like I came away with many "winners." Nonetheless, in the spirit of sharing a fun time, here are some from a subject most of you should recognize.

Big Ben, taken from Westminster Abbey

London Aerial, Thames river, Big Ben and Parliament, taken as a 6 frame panorama
from the London Eye

Holding Ben, just a fun snap taken from Westminster bridge

And that last shot, believe it or not, is my favorite of the set. Go figure.

As we saw yesterday, HDR is one tool in our get-the-right-exposure arsenal. Recently I’ve been trying a new approach to make HDR panoramas with some pleasing results. Especially for nighttime photography, HDR allows us to expand the dynamic range of our images and side-step the challenge that bright lights and deep shadows present. Here are two HDR panoramas images of the Long Beach, California skyline.

Panoramas present their own unique and interesting challenges. Seldom will they work along usual composition lines such as the rule of thirds or simplification. The subject is rarely something as straight-forward as a tree or an interesting rock in the foreground, but rather, often turns out to be the entire scene — a huge prairie, a mountain range, or a cityscape — and as such must be unusual and striking enough to hold the viewer’s interest. In addition, the viewer will not be able to take in the entire scene as easily as she would with a standard composition, and when we add HDR, we bring more detail in the shadows and hence more information that the viewer must process.

HDR could also save what would otherwise have been a contrast-less panorama, or one where a bright sky on one side of the composition threatens to undo the image, as is the case in this next example. In the non-HDR version, the drama in the sky was lost, but with HDR it all comes to the forefront. Unlike the previous two examples, this panorama’s smaller size provides more of a standard composition, as we saw in a previous article.

If you want to give HDR panoramas a try, I recommend you do so with a tool that integrates both HDR and panorama capabilities in the same application. An integrated tool will save you a lot of time and effort and make the process one that you are more likely to embrace.

If you have been dreaming about becoming independently wealthy so that you can afford a digital medium format camera, you may want to know you don’t need to keep playing the lottery. Having read Dennis Frates’ article from the August 2009 issue of Outdoor Photographer, I decided to try his technique of generating 4×5 format images by stitching 3 vertical frame panoramas.

At first, I decided that visualizing the right composition in 3 frames instead of just one would require some imagination, so for each scene I tried, I first shot a single 3×2 standard format image. This next sample was taken at 10mm to approximate the wide perspective a 3 frame panorama gives. Incidentally, and not particularly on point, this image also happens to be a 3-stop HDR.

Once I decided the composition worked, I then set up for a 3-frame panorama with vertical frames. For extra credit I could have shot each frame as a 3-stop HDR, but regrettably, I decided against it. Nonetheless, I was able to push the shadows out a bit in the resultant 4×5 composition. Since each frame was shot at 14mm, the final image benefits from reduced distortion while retaining the wide perspective.

A parting note: while the first image is a 10 mega-pixel capture, the stitched 4×5 version clocks in at 16.7 mega-pixels. Not bad for the lowly D80.