Spoon Bay Star Trail Digital Panoramic – Video tutorial

Out once again messing about with shooting under moonlight. This time trying something totally different that I haven’t seen done before and that was to shoot a digital panoramic at night using the moon light and this was the result.

I have shared my capture details, thoughts and full post production process with my Rubbing Pixels members in a members only 21 minute video tutorial.

Full details and tutorial outline can be found on this link

CLICK THE IMAGE FOR A LARGER VIEW

Spoon Bay on Velvia 50

Going through a mountain of film from over the years and scanning all the shots you over look or don’t want to add to the site at that time, also heaps of stock images in there as well. Quite a task that’s for sure.

This is one that slipped through the net. What I love about this shot other than the great colour is that it was scanned and then only a slight “Exposure” adjustment layer was added to brighten the foreground. Thats it for the Photoshop side of things with this one. Got to love Velvia 50 slide film.

Shot on Christan Fletchers old work horse that I bought a few years ago, the Fuji GX617 with the 90mm lens @ F45. Click the image for a larger view.

5D Mark II – 1st Outing

With my new 5D Mark II in hand I decided to head out to Spoon Bay to put it to the test. Boy it is a pleasure to use compared to the 1ds Mark II. The 3 inch screen is amazing.

For what I thought was going to be a plain sunrise really lent itself to something special. One of the key features of Spoon Bay is the water spout that starts as the tide comes in and on sunrise is really comes to life. Waiting for the right moment and then Bang the sets roll in and the spout goes off.

I haven’t really noticed much image quality difference between the 5D Mk II and the 1ds Mk II RAW files in terms of better detail but when processing the shot the blues are so much better and there is also an extra 10MB of files size (at 8 bit) as well which is nice to have.

Here comes the sun

Here is another shot from the same day as the image below. A bit more care has been taken in the editing. This image appeals to be more because of the warmth where the sun is rising and the light trail in the water.

Unlike the shot below this image is just a single shot edited. No HDR, no multiple exposure. Let me know what you think.

Canon 1Ds Mark II | 24-70mm f2.8 lens shot at 24mm | F11 @ 1/4 sec | 200 iso | .9 lee filter ND soft grad

HDR by Multiple exposure blending

This HDR shooting and blending technique / process and me are far from friends. But this week I have told myself that I was going to give it a go. So I headed out to one of my favourite places at the moment on the Central Coast (Spoon Bay) and kicked things off.

After a nice sunrise I headed home and played with a set of images in Photomatix and after getting annoyed at the results I ended things for the day hitting Command Q on the mac thus killing the terrible image before me and terminating the program. I then decided to take a different approach and blend the three images in Photoshop. The images are -1, 0 and +1 in exposure.

So the shot on the right is my first attempt at exposure blending. I know the composition is lacking but this is just a set of shots I pulled off the card to have a go. So be kind.

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Got a few more to play with and will post once they are done.

Cheers

Boom, Spoon Bay

Another shot of Spoon Bay. The shot had everything I wanted but the colour just wasnt there and the shadows were quite blue. But it worked great as a toned B&W. All done in CS3.