The “Hand Made” Viewfinder for shooting digital panoramics – Video Tutorial

A prized piece of equipment that all digital panoramic shooters would like to get their hands on is a viewfinder that comes with owning a fix lens film system so they could preview scenes prior to setting up and shooting them.

Well once you see this tutorial you wont need to want one. When owning the G617 with the fixed camera viewfinder Matt Lauder got sick and tired of having to pull the camera out seach time to view the scene to see if it worked or not. So he devised a simple way to preview every scene without needing the camera.

This tutorials can be found in the “Shooting Digital Panoramics” section of the site. It is a members only tutorial. Click here to be taken to the tutorial.

New tutorial – Location planning with the Photographers Ephemeris

A new and fantastic tool on the market is the Photographers Ephemeris. In this tutorial we look at how the tool can be used to plan in detail how to get the best from locations on your “Must shoot list”.

We go through some well known locations in Australia and show you what we consider the best time to shoot them and how you can do it all with this application. You will never shoot in bad light again.

This tutorial is now available under the “Tips and Tricks” section of our tutorials. Free for members or $4.99 for guests. To view the tutorial please click here.

Norah Head Lighthouse Video Masterclass

After two weeks of scattered showers there seamed to be a break in all the grey so my mate Adam and I headed out to Norah Head Lighthouse which is just north of Soldiers Beach. The sunrise itself wasnt anything special but the light falling onto the headland was fantastic. Running around shooting as much as possible on both film and digital I ended up with a few crackers and this was one of them that I was able to grab in between film captures. (Film was sent off today, cant wait.)

This one was shot on the 5D MkII with the 17-40mm f4 lens @ 17mm.

I have created the full editing of this image from scratch as a 22 minute video tutorial that is available at Rubbing Pixels. Free for members or $9.99 for guests.

Click the image to see a larger view of the shot.

LR/Enfuse plug in for Lightroom 2 – Exposure Fusion

A new work flow that is emerging in popular programs like Lightroom, PtGui and Photomatix Pro is the enfusing of images with different exposure values. Sure we have all done this in Photoshop with masks but these programs are now doing it for us with promising results. The above shot from the Skillion was taken with a standard +1, 0, -1 bracket and then run through Lightroom 2 using the LR/Enfuse plugin. The blend wasn’t as dramatic as I had expected but it certainly pulling in the highlights and opened up the shadow area and it kept the image looking natural which is a far cry from shooting HDR images.

When out shooting this one I bumped into Ken Duncan who was also shooting the same sunrise with his well used Linhof and doing a bit of a promo shoot for Lumix cameras. It was good to see Ken was wearing the same high quality footwear as myself… thongs.

The above image has been made into a video tutorial from the Lightroom workflow into Photoshop CS4 for final development and is available on the Rubbing Pixels website. For those interested in reading about using the same method with Photomatix Pro check out our articles and read the one written by Kevin McNeal.