Combined Techniques

Let's put together two photo techniques and see what happens.

The last post here was about creating a panorama. Back in August of 2012 I did a post on HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photography.

In creating a panorama two or more shots are assembled into an extra wide or panoramic image. In HDR photography two or more different exposures of the same image are put together to create an image with detail in all areas including portions of the image that would be too bright, or too dark, to include detailed information.

So now let's combine the techniques and create an HDR panorama. In this case I pointed my camera at the left end of the about to be created panorama and took five images at five different exposures. Moving to the center of the future panorama and being sure to overlap the first shot series, I took another five exposures from way too dark to way too light. Moving right I repeated the procedure for the final shot.

Now I uploaded all 15 exposures to my computer and started to work. I selected the first five images and exported them to Photomatix Pro and created an HDR composite. With the next five I repeated the process using the same settings to create the same effect and then did the same once again for the last five.

Now with three HDR images in my Lightroom organizer I selected them and selected "Merge to Panorama in Photoshop" and here is the result:

I enjoy creating HDR photos and also panoramas. I have contemplated putting the two together on several occasions but had not stopped and said OK, now is the time. Well then came four inches of rain and the creek in my back yard looked more like a river (to me) and I decided now is the time.

Still I cheated. I used the Program Mode and a five shot automatically created bracketing series in Nikon's Continuous High shooting mode, where the camera takes one exposure at the meter reading, then at one and two stops less and then one and two stops more. In Continuous High mode this takes less than a second on the Nikon D700 and was done hand held. Here, as in the processing described above, I repeated the same steps twice more and the shooting was done.

Photoshop had no trouble matching the images. Since I was standing quite close to the creek the curve is exaggerated but since there really is a curve it looks nearly the same as real life. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised by what happens even when I take shortcuts I know I would be better off not taking.

Give it a try, surprise yourself.

Shooting a Panorama

A panorama is not difficult to shoot. Many current cameras have built in assistance for doing them and several allow you to point your camera at one end of your panorama, press the shutter button, and sweep across the scene until you reach the other end, stop and wait a few seconds and your panorama is complete. Heck my phone does that. OK, my phone does a pretty poor job of doing that. You might substitute another word for pretty if your not blogging.

Here I'll describe doing it the old-fashioned way, like we did it way back in 2008. You might have noticed in a post a few days back that it's not a new idea. The shot here was from about 1976 and if your familial with Salisbury Maryland this is the back of downtown and a parking garage in the right side of the photo has not yet been built. Technology wise this is an amalgam; the shots were done on black & white Tri-X film and were, just a few years back, scanned into digital files and stored on my computer. I found them recently and told Photoshop CS6 to create a panorama for me and voila a panorama.

Most panoramas today begin life as digital images and what follows will assume you have either a DSLR or another digital camera that you can control manually. As I mentioned in an earlier post the reason manual control is needed for panorama photos is that they are made of several separate photos and when assembled as you see here they should appear as a single image. A single image has a single exposure, a single white balance, and a single point of focus. If you use your camera in a automatic mode all three of those things may change with each shot. Now that I've said that I'll say that if you took your photos in a automatic mode today's panorama creating software may very well do a great job of putting them together, but here on Jim's Photo Stuff we are going to be more careful so we'll use the Manual Mode.

Step one, of course, is to choose what you are going to shoot. The method we will be describing will work best if there is nothing very close to the camera. If you want that kind of shot we'll discuss some more techniques down near the bottom of the post.

I have gotten very good results creating panoramas with my camera hand held, but I do recommend a tripod if one is available. If I am shooting hand held I face the end of my panorama and line up the camera for the last image, then I twist my body until I can line up my first shot. Now I take the first shot and slightly untwist to prepare for the second shot. You will want the shots to overlap by about 1/3 so there will be plenty of area for the software to create a good alignment. Untwist some more, take the next shot and so on until you take the last shot. It is important to keep the camera level for each shot. Pointing down or up will create a curved image which doesn't usually look as creative as it sounds.

If you are using a tripod, level your camera and turn it left and right deciding where the image will start and where it will stop. In the hand held description I did not mention exposure, white balance, and focus, but I will cover them here and you will use the same procedure whichever method you choose.

Set your camera in the Manual Mode and look at the panorama you've planned. Do you see a brighter area and do you see a darker area. You are looking for an area that is in between, not the darkest and not the lightest. Set your exposure for that area. Be sure your focus is in manual mode and focus on a point roughly 1/3 of the way into the shot. Take your white balance off automatic and set it to the current conditions such as daylight or cloudy. Now take all the images you planned being sure to over lap them by about 1/3.

If you would like to include items that are relatively close to the camera pay attention here. The image to the right shows the type of path your camera will follow if you hold it in your hand and twist your body as I described above.


In the second image you will see how your camera will move if the panning is done on a tripod with the camera attached the way cameras are usually attached. The camera pivots around the point on the camera body where the tripod screw attaches.

Now for the optical purists and the people trying to include items near the camera and far away lets look at the third image. You will need to purchase or "home brew" a panoramic head for your tripod. A panoramic head allows the camera to slide backward so that the point of rotation is not under the camera body but under the lens and specifically under what is called the nodal point of the lens. A search for panoramic heads or panoramic heads diy should provide you with enough information to spin you head as well as your camera, but if the regular tripod method is not giving you correctly aligned images this may be your answer.

You're not done of course you now have the shots but no panoramic image. Upload your panorama pieces to your computer in the usual way. Now since my typing fingers have exceeded today's mileage allotment we'll be back soon with what to do now.

Thanks for reading.
Jim King

The Manual Mode

In my last post I nearly ranted about the Program Mode. And that, seriously, is the way I shoot. I try to use the camera's computer to do the hard work, fast. I did mention that their were situations which require using the manual mode and I'd like to tackle some of them here. I say "some of them" because as I go I'll probably think of more and more, but as a percentage of shooting situations I think those that require Manual Mode are a fairly small percentage (I may change my opinion on that as I go, but I don't think so).

Baseball under lights (Little League) My experience has been that Little League fields are lit well; this is not pro ball where the fields seem as bright as daylight but, kick up the ISO to 800, open the lens wide, and you can get shutter speeds of 125th of a second. What is difficult to get is consistent exposure. The background for a specific shot may be bright dirt around home plate, mid tone grass in much of the field, or black sky behind a low angle shot. Each one of these situations creates a different exposure and your subject (a player) may be exposed properly, or be under or over by a stop or more. Since the fields are lit quite evenly you can try several exposures manually until you get one you like and stick with it. The players are usually lit the same wherever they are. I find in the deep outfield I may need a stop more and I can set that on the fly quickly.

Followed the same rules with b&w film in the mid 70s.

Panoramas A panorama is composed of several shots, at least two and maybe eight or more. Let's say we take 5 photos that we plan to combine into one panorama. If the exposure changes between each shot they will be hard to blend together. Moreover if the white balance changes, or the focus it can be difficult to create the final image that looks like one photo. So here is the second occasion that Manual Exposure is, if not absolutely necessary, is a far better way of creating the necessary images to blend into a panorama.

Night Sky Taking a photo of the stars in the sky is relatively easy in the Manual Mode and virtually impossible in any automatic mode. Here's how to make a first try. After dark set your camera up on a tripod and aim it at the area of the sky you'd like to try first. A small flashlight will come in very handy.

• Set your Mode to manual
• Focus to manual
• ISO to 400
• Aperture to it's widest opening (smallest number)
• Focus at infinity
• Shutter speed to 30 seconds
• Shoot

You can't do that in an automatic mode but it will probably give you a good start for your first night sky shot.

Studio Photography This topic is way beyond the scope of this post but traditional studio photography uses flash studio studio lights. The shutter speed is normally set to the "sync" speed of the camera, maybe 1/250 sec. and the aperture adjusted for correct exposure. If neither the lights or the subject moves all exposures will be identical. Auto exposure will not work with studio lights. (Studio is studio, dogs are allowed.)

Multiple flashes can be used fully automatically if, as an example, you purchase all Nikon Speedlights and operate them with Nikon's CLS flash control system. Canon and others have similar systems and some after market manufacturers sell flashes that are advertised to operate with this system.

Multiple Flash (the inexpensive variety) Another method of studio style lighting can be done with relatively inexpensive flash units that are, like Nikon Speedlights, designed to fit on top of a camera. This is done in exactly the same manner as studio photography above and the camera is in a fully manual mode. In studio situations you can use auto-focus if desired.

Groups of Similar Photos to be Displayed Together Here an example might be several photos of the same child playing in the back yard. In an automatic mode the skin color and tone as well as the appearance of clothing can change in a disconcerting manner between photos. Manual Mode will solve this problem.

Of course some experienced photographers use manual exposure all the time. With practice it can be very fast and easy. I will still save it for those occasions when I feel it's necessary and use Program Mode most of the time. This is a topic that can create a discussion similar to the Nikon vs. Canon wars that occur among photographers. I don't claim to have the best answer, but the one that works well for me.

Since I've posted a taste of using the Manual Mode I believe I've planted a seed which I may try to grow in coming posts. Perhaps the Muse is with me.

Using the Program Mode

I haven't written any posts for a long time, but here is an item I would like to discuss. The Program Mode. I teach photography classes and I find that, for the most part, students are divided into those who set their camera to the Auto, or "Green Camera" mode (yeah sometimes red) and those who have become more serious and have switched to the Manual Mode. The "Green Camera" mode in modern digital cameras works very well. You will usually get well exposed and in focus photos and be pleased with the results. 

The Green mode relies on the three most important aspects of good photography: 

• Where you are standing
• Which way you are pointing the camera
• When you press the shutter button

Great photos are made all the time by getting those three items correct. The problem, for those who are getting more serious, is that the Green mode gives you no control over anything else and while the "Big Three" are VERY important, the decisions made by your camera's computer do not always result in the best photo and doing well in the big three can still result in a bad photo.

Good photographers use more control to create better photos. Good photographers adjust Shutter Speed to control how motion is captured, Aperture to control how much of the image is in focus, and ISO to allow Shutter Speed and Aperture to be set in a range that will deliver the image they want. Many photographers as they become more serious are aware of this and since they want to control all of these things gravitate to the Manual Mode. Please don't misinterpret me here, the Manual Mode works and there are times when it is the only way to get images the way you want them. 

However, your camera is capable of sophisticated light measuring and exposure calculations that happen faster than you could possibly compete with, and when you put your camera in the Manual Mode you are turning off (for the most part) the camera's computer. When you put your camera in the Green mode you are turning off much of your input. I propose a system (and a Mode) that uses the camera's computer and allows you almost all of the control the Manual Mode shooter has. The Program Mode.

Let's set the camera to "P" or Program Mode and see what control we have (in most DSLR cameras, I can't promise all).

We now control the ISO, the camera will not change it and we get to decide what setting to use.

We control the flash, it will not flash unless we turn it on and it will flash, even in bright sunlight, if we do turn it on. If you are a newbie you may not realize how important this is but when you are taking close up photos of people in bright sun there are usually dark shadow on the face. The flash will automatically lighten the shadows and create a more pleasing image, and that is just one example.

Look through your viewfinder and find the aperture and shutter speed. They are both displayed in most viewfinders and your manual will tell you which is which. Watch the numbers and, at the same time, rotate the main command dial. On most DSLRs if you're rotating the correct dial the numbers will change. One will get larger and the other will get smaller and rotating the other way will reverse the process. If you watch the Shutter Speed you can adjust it to a slower or faster speed and the computer will adjust the aperture to give you a correct exposure.

If you watch the aperture you can set it for a smaller number so that the background will be out of focus and not compete with your subject if you spin it the other way, to a larger number, more will be in focus so that more of the photo will be sharp.

Take a shot and look at the image on the camera's LCD. Is it too dark or too light? If it is the camera's meter did not do what you wanted. Find the small button that looks something like [+/-] you may have to consult your manual under "exposure compensation" to be sure how to use it but frequently you just hold the button down and rotate the command dial. Your display will either show a minus sign followed by increasing numbers or no sign (or +) followed by a number that ranges from 1 to 3 or maybe more. If it is a minus sign you image will be darker when you shoot next and if no sign or + your photo will be brighter.

For most photos there is nothing that you can do in the Manual Mode that can't be duplicated in Program Mode. You can pick your aperture or shutter speed. In Manual Mode you can pick both but you must compensate for changing one by changing the other to keep the same exposure which in Program Mode is done for you automatically. In Manual Mode you can deliberately choose to under expose or over expose and in Program Mode you can do the same with Exposure Compensation. In Manual you must change the ISO yourself and the same in Program; In manual you decide when to use flash and in Program you make the same decision. Flash is controlled automatically in Program Mode and has it's own Flash Exposure Compensation. In Manual you need to figure it out and that requires you to do mathematical calculations and to know the distance from you camera to your subject.

When do I recommend using the Manual Mode? Well since I've typed quite a bit, I will try to return on the next post to address that question.

Thanks, for reading.

Jim