[Pictures] Panoramas, HDR and travelling

skyglow1

New Zealand3962 Posts

January 05 2010 08:16 GMT

Warning: Picture intensive blog

Hi guys,
I've always been semi-interested in photography. I know a bit more about photography than your average person who owns a camera, but my knowledge doesn't go much further after that. My camera isn't great either: it's a really entry level Fujifilm Finepix Z33 WP that's pretty cheap. Before that I used a Canon Powershot G5, and had good fun with it like my attempts at shooting lightning (which you can see here).

Lately I've been really interested in trying panoramas because I'm sick of only capturing such a narrow field of view when I find the full view really stunning. Also, I looked a bit into High Dynamic Range imaging because I was frustrated at not being able to capture what the scene really looked like when there was something really bright or dark in the scene. Basically, I like taking pictures that come closer to representing what the place really looks like. I don't usually try and do artsy stuff, or photos that convey emotions etc., and my photos are piles of shit compared to the work done by our talented resident photographers at TL, but I have a lot of fun taking my photos, and I hope I can share some of that fun with you too.

Non-photography side story: Our national carrier, Air New Zealand, is really great in terms of advertising and promotions. Grabaseat is one of their best goodies that they run. The website hosts daily cheap fares, often half price or less, on domestic and only sometimes international fares. In the past few months, the guy who runs Grabaseat has been offering $1 fares. These are full fares too which gives you a gauranteed flight, not just standby fares. Sometimes the guy goes crazy and puts on $1 + airport taxes international flights (return), which was happened 3 times this year if I remember correctly.

Such craziness happened on a day in late November 09, when destinations such as Los Angeles, San Franscico, Honolulu, Sydney, Brisbane, Tokyo, Norfolk Island were put on the website. It's basically who can go through the online booking process the fastest who gets the tickets. At it's peak on that day, there were 15,000+ people online waiting for the Los Angeles tickets (only 10 tickets for each destination) to be released. Dates are non-negotiable usually but with deals like NZ$126 total ($1 + $125 for airport taxes) for a return economy flight Auckland-Los Angeles, you'd be insane not to try. I wanted to try for Honolulu ($74!) and knew from a previous experience that it would be released early in the morning, but was half hearted and went for a shower instead. I came back to see the tickets were released (and snatched up in less than a minute of course). Meh.

After coming back home from a half day work, I decided to try for Norfolk Island as it is easier to grab than the other more popular international destinations, and I thought it would be a pretty cool place to go as it's a bit more unique. I checked Air NZ's flight schedule for flights to Norfolk Island, and found out they only fly there every Saturday on a 737. The dates on which you have to fly for Grabaseat international fares are often not many days after the day the tickets are released. Since this day of craziness was a Friday (20th Nov), there was a good chance that the Norfolk Island seats would be for the Saturday, which was the next day (21st Nov)!

I managed to grab the seats, and actually they sold out awfully slow (took like 5 minutes for them to completely sell out). There's no real time to look at the dates or comprehend them when you're booking…you just click click click as fast as you can. It turned out my flight dates were 21st Nov to 28th Nov! It was an early morning flight too so I had a total of 10 hours to pack and sort out my accommodation, but in the end it worked out. My fare was NZ$200 in total because the airport taxes at Norfolk Island are quite expensive. It would've been over $600 if it had been booked normally. Sweet.

My stay at Norfolk Island was great. My flight was literally 95% 50+ year olds. I was one of only about 5 who were under 30, and the only asian too on the whole flight. I couldn’t help but feel that I stuck out like a sore thumb. I didn't realise it was such a popular place for the oldies. A bit about the island: Norfolk Island is a small island located between New Zealand and Australia, and is about a 1 and a half hour flight from Auckland in a northwest direction. It is under the Australian government, and their currency there is the Australian dollar. The speed limit is 40km/h, and there is no requirement for seatbelts. Cars have to give way to cows, which are often on the side of the road and can cross the road. The island is populated by numerous Norfolk Island pine trees, which aren't actually really pines apparently. Life on Norfolk Island is pretty laid back.

Back to the photography side of things: I had a really fun time using my Fujifilm camera at Norfolk Island. I tried doing both panoramas and a tiny bit of HDR to see if it would actually work at all. I also took a lot of individual photographs, but they aren’t worth showing and I think the panoramas do a much better job. All my Panoramas are taken hand-held, but sometimes using some object to steady the camera on. Only near the end of the trip did I realise that I could use the 3x3 grid on my camera to help me get a better alignment on my individual images. I used the program Autostitch to put the images together, which was great. I had to reduce the size of some of these images because photobucket only allows 1mb max files. Sorry I haven't cropped them, too lazy lol. Here they are:

[Edit]On second thoughts these are WAY too big so I made much smaller versions of them:

+ Show Spoiler +

Sunset at Anson Bay. I think it might've been the first time I've watched the sun dip into the water like that. So pretty!

A place on the southwest of the island (if I remember correctly) called crystal pool.

Can't really remember where this was. I think it was in the north part of the island.

Anson Bay itself. Spent a lot of my time here because it was so nice. 20 minute walk down, which most people can't be bothered doing so there were hardly any people down at the beach most times.

My spot on the sand :D

Northwards view from the highest point on the island.

Southwards view from the highest point on the island.

I've never seen so much water in my life!

One of the two ports on the island.

Looking backwards at the cliff at Anson Bay that you have to get down.

Full sized (except for the ones that had to be reduced to 1mb):

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Sunset at Anson Bay. I think it might've been the first time I've watched the sun dip into the water like that. So pretty!

A place on the southwest of the island (if I remember correctly) called crystal pool.

Can't really remember where this was. I think it was in the north part of the island.

Anson Bay itself. Spent a lot of my time here because it was so nice. 20 minute walk down, which most people can't be bothered doing so there were hardly any people down at the beach most times.

My spot on the sand :D

Northwards view from the highest point on the island.

Southwards view from the highest point on the island.

I've never seen so much water in my life!

One of the two ports on the island.

Looking backwards at the cliff at Anson Bay that you have to get down.

I also took just 4 shots in a trial attempt of HDR imaging. If you want to know more about it, look at the wikipedia article here which has a much better explanation than anything I could do and some really nice (much nicer than mine

) examples. I thought my crappy attempts at HDR would fail miserably, but they actually sort of turned out alright. They were definitely much better than I expected, so I'm happy with that! There are a lot of settings to play around with in the program which I used, so I will do more tweaking and take more photos to see how far I can go with it. Sorry about the watermark on the photos guys.

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This is the high exposure shot at Anson Bay.

This is the low exposure shot at Anson Bay.

This is the combined result. It looks better than either of the two separate images

[Edit]This probably shows it better. The random stuff on the left part of the photo is the bark of the tree that I used for support lol.

High exposure.

Low exposure.

Combined result. Looks really unnatural actually but it's early days

Comparison

As an extra, these are some panoramas I took today and yesterday from a mini trip up north. The one from the driveway is my first attempt at using two rows of images instead of one to create a panorama. I really should use a tripod, but they're so cumbersome :D Sumer in NZ is great!

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Just north of Cooper’s beach

Cooper’s beach

Cooper’s beach again

Mangonui. View from the motel room.

Mangonui. View from the motel driveway.

Hope you enjoyed this blog post!

Ilikestarcraft

Korea (South)17727 Posts

January 05 2010 08:29 GMT

wow i really love the sunset pictures

thopol

Japan4560 Posts

January 05 2010 08:33 GMT

Sounds like an awesome vacation. I love the pics, particularly the ones set at different times and the ones with high contrast between the dark foreground trees and bright, flat beach beyond (Cooper beach).

5/5 of course.

minus_human

4784 Posts

January 05 2010 08:36 GMT

Great stuff, but as advice, I recommend using more than 2 different exposures to create a HDR image. A really good hdr needs many levels of lighting in order to represent everything homogeneously, so as many as six or seven shots is not too much.

Keept it up, you have an eye for composition which proves some talent, work on it!

phosphorylation

United States2935 Posts

January 05 2010 08:37 GMT

Nice pictures: this one is my favorite though
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/skyglow1/Norfolk Island/spano3.jpg

What program are you using to create panorama?
edit: oh i see

skyglow1

New Zealand3962 Posts

January 05 2010 08:39 GMT

Thanks for the comments guys :D

On January 05 2010 17:36 minus_human wrote:
Great stuff, but as advice, I recommend using more than 2 different exposures to create a HDR image. A really good hdr needs many levels of lighting in order to represent everything homogeneously, so as many as six or seven shots is not too much.

Keept it up, you have an eye for composition which proves some talent, work on it!

Yeah I realised I needed a few more than two different exposures after reading up on websites how to actually do HDR. After reading that, I was expecting that putting only two shots through the program would end up in a completely failure but it wasn't too bad. I think I will lug a tripod around next time and really give it a good go with the HDR.

IskatuMesk

Canada969 Posts

January 05 2010 08:39 GMT

Awesome! I got a Finepix S1500 for Christmas. Pretty much entry-level as well. Unfortunately there is nothing interesting to take pictures of around here... so no nice big sunsets for me.

And I have no idea how to take HDR shots or anything at all, really.

PanoRaMa

United States5069 Posts

January 05 2010 08:51 GMT

blog title on sidebar tricked me, i was scared for a minute there

alffla

Hong Kong20321 Posts

January 05 2010 08:52 GMT

nice photos ;o

the hdr stuff is interesting.

minus_human

4784 Posts

January 05 2010 09:03 GMT

#10

You need to play with the tonemaping function in Photomatrix after the merge is complete. Did you do that?

skyglow1

New Zealand3962 Posts

January 05 2010 09:04 GMT

#11

On January 05 2010 18:03 minus_human wrote:
You need to play with the tonemaping function in Photomatrix after the merge is complete. Did you do that?

Yeah I did but I didn't really know what I was doing lol.

Actually I used the HDR function then did tone mapping, then used the exposure fusion function instead and felt that I got a better result from that. I'll try taking some better shots then playing around more with tone mapping.

minus_human

4784 Posts

January 05 2010 12:34 GMT

#12

You got on the front page, congrats!

TL photographers fighting

GoSu

Korea (South)1773 Posts

January 05 2010 13:23 GMT

#13

The 3rd one is so nice! It reminds me some maps on Age of Empires III ahah ^^
All pictures are nice though!

skyglow1

New Zealand3962 Posts

January 05 2010 20:06 GMT

#14

On January 05 2010 21:34 minus_human wrote:
You got on the front page, congrats!

TL photographers fighting

Oh sweet thanks for this! I wouldn't've noticed because I don't ever look at the home page haha.

Amarxist

United States371 Posts

January 05 2010 20:35 GMT

#15

Nice HDR's.

Kinky

United States4126 Posts

January 05 2010 22:44 GMT

#16

I became extremely interested in making panoramas and HDR's when I got my first camera

It's a really nice feeling when you see the final result. Good job on yours! I love seeing nature shots.

marcoso

Brazil818 Posts

January 06 2010 16:19 GMT

#17

NICE
I love panoramas, but have been more into city skylines, skyscrapers and urban photos

here's a cool urban photo contest
There's a vertical panorama, which is awesome too

BTW, loved the lightning pics!

JieXian

Malaysia4677 Posts

January 07 2010 06:58 GMT

#18

This HDR this looks interesting!

If only some of these were bigger or more suitable.. i'd make some of these my wallpaper. Maybe I'll make my own picture blog later on too :D