Stevo's Page

I read about a program called PTGui on Flickr when someone was explaining how they stitched together some shots to create a panorama and to be honest at that time I wasnt particularly bothered. A few weeks later and I decided to give the trial a go and now I just cant get over what I've been missing all this time!
It literally does everything for you. You can just be randomly snapping a subject trying to get it all covered, not particularly trying to line the shots up and have full confidence that when you just bung them into PTGui it will do the most awesom stitching job.
A picture can speak a thousand words (cliche alert!!) so it's best if i just show you one of my favourite examples. A few years ago I went to NYC and my poor little camera wasnt wide enough to get all of it in when I was trying to shoot Dana Barrett's appartment block from Ghostbusters... Here are the original 2 shots:


As you can see they dont particularly line up, they are not even really at the correct angles. That is until PTGui has its wicked way with it!! Step up Mr Final Result!!!


I just gave it a minor bit of cropping in photoshop, slight colour correction and hey presto!!!


I will just show you one more example, again from my new york trip of years ago. This time from the top of the empire state building. Now there is no way i thought it was going to handle stitching these together but lo and behold it came through. The photo's I gave it were not enough to create a full frame shot but that just helps to show the element of warping that PTGui performs on each image to get it into the right aspect.

After weeks of nagging Sonia into letting me take a few portraits she eventually gave in today and obliged. We could have picked a better day to be honest as we ended up having to dodge the rain but nevertheless we did get a handful of decent shots. We are especially happy considering this was my first time attempting this kind of photography and it was Sonia's first time modeling for it too.

The original colour shots were pretty good but we found that they stepped up a level when converting them to a hi-key monochrome effect in photoshop.

Hopefully we'll be able to try this again on a nice sunny late afternoon sometime soon.

Check out the best of the rest of the session on my flickr page (link on the right side of the page... )

I purposely didn't post yesterday as I was waiting to see if I could gain any success at shooting fireworks tonight at the Felixstowe Carnival. I'm quite pleased for my first attempt, if I do say so myself. The fireworks finale was a bit of a disaster as I didn't realise it was coming up, so I had a 30 second exposure set in shutter priority mode expecting to get a few smaller fireworks but just as i pressed the button all the huge ones started going off! Was too much going on for such a long exposure :)
I was switching beween shutter and aperture priority mode as in shutter it was always selecting f3.5 . Setting AP to f8 was giving me 30 second exposures providing some nice results... definitely an experimental 15 mins anyways...

This image just happens to have been shot in AP at f8 with 30s exposure.

Nearly there... The penultimate day of my month-long photo-a-day project! It seems like it's been much longer than a month (i guess technically it has been due to some days off in between due to holiday and stuff).

I think this is possibly my most artistic shot of the whole project today. I don't quite know why I like it so much, maybe i'm slowly falling in love with the black and white cross processed look... We will have to see what I come up with tomorrow to find out if I am developing a new obsession :)

today i learned the genius of applying cross-processing colour effects after conversion to black and white, here is one of my early efforts.
I took the pic today from the top of Foundation Street car park in Ipswich, looking over the new-build luxury flats, of which there are waaay too many for such a hole of a town.