When I just happened to glance outside, I noticed an unusual and strong color tint. So I immediately jumped out of my chair and ran to my camera. By that time, the color started to fade. It is amazing how ephemeral these occurrences are.
I also tried taking a picture after grabbing a color-neutral filter and taking a white-balance setting frame. But the result was rather bland after the light skew was subtracted from the picture..
The first time I tried to take a panorama of this, I hand-held the camera and just winged it by trying to keep the same point of rotation. This time, I used a panoramic tripod. But there is still problems with the low angle of view. I think I need to get it about twenty feet into the air for a better viewpoint.
Later, when I was processing this panorama, I noticed the following tag. Sigh. People make me sad sometimes.
I took a High Definition Range panorama of the Austin Skyline today at Disch Field. And learned some things. I set aperture priority. Which was a mistake. The exposure settings changed slightly on every picture. Which caused color problems. Fortunately, Photoshop was up to the task of correcting the pictures to a common white balance.
It also took a while to wait while people left the individual frames of pictures.
I noticed an interesting style of fire hydrant on Anderson Lane. Hrm. Maybe I should keep my eye out to see if there are other types of unique hydrants out there…
When I went to Georgetown to take a panorama, I ran into trouble. I placed my tripod here. Which was on the sidewalk of a bridge overlooking a small river and right next to a public park. As I was waiting for the sun to set, I notice something odd. A man was standing under one of the trees and was looking in my direction. He waited for a while and then finally left. I thought he was looking at birds or something. But then a teenager walks down the sidewalk and starts confronting me. He claims that I was taking pictures of his house. I didn’t even notice the trailer off in the distance before. I didn’t bother educating him that my camera’s lens was not powerful enough to resolve his barely visible trailer., which was not even where I was pointing the camera towards. I just calmly listened to him and then told him that I was on public land and he could just sod off.
I guess that it is inevitable that I was going to take a picture of a cat in a box.
I went to the downtown Austin gathering of the world wide photowalk. But I was rather disappointed in it. The leader said a few words and then everyone went their own separate way. I could go downtown anytime to take some photos. And this is how it felt. I decided to take my 45mm tilt-shift lens with me.
But before we wandered off, someone got a group of people together to simulate paparazzi.
The lens is a manually focused and is hard to get 100% sure that focus is exactly where you want it. I tried using the video screen with limited success. It was usually a little bit off.
I only used the tilting feature of the focus plane. It has an interesting effect in directing the eye.
I didn’t go for the miniature effect either.
This cab driver was rather fond of her horse. And did not mind posing for photos.
I would have liked the moon to be a bit more over to the right. And for it to be within the focus plane.
Another picture just a little bit off. Hopefully, I wasn’t too intimidating on the street.
I liked this one.
And this one as well. I didn’t notice how the Frost Bank building looks like a transformer.
The capitol complex has a lot of visitors. Rather than waiting a really long time for people to clear from an individual frame, taking the shot, moving the camera, and then waiting some more, I decided to try a Photoshop technique. Which consists of taking a lot of pictures of the same frame. And then using an averaging algorithm on the series of pictures. It’s called “tourist removal.” Unfortunately, it was not perfect. The median value left visible artifacts. I had to take a more manual approach.
But that was not my biggest problem of the day. Oh, no. Instead of using a manual setting for the aperture, shutter, and ISO, I used the aperture priority mode. This caused color issues when stitched together. When Photoshop stitched the pictures and tried to automatically average the colors, something dramatic happened to the marble stonework. It gave the stone vitiligo. So sad.
I took a vertical panorama of a yucca plant, but Photoshop’s automatic stitching had problems aligning the top of the series.
My new camera, the 7D, can take HD videos. Since I like food photography, I wanted to see how food videography would work. And are there a whole new set of issues. While a flash works well for a picture, a video needs constant light. And a lot of it at that. Halogen lights are cheap, but they are hot and need color correction. The next problem is syncing an external audio recorder with the video footage. The onboard audio microphone is minimalistic and is not good enough for a clean source. I now understand why clapper-boards are used. You need a quick and clear sound pulse to match against an obvious video event. I had to make due with clapping my hands. I also had to learn Adobe Premiere CS5 and Adobe After Effects CS5. Which are really complicated programs.
Cooking Video first test from Mark Hamzy on Vimeo.
For my first video, I decided to make butter. Which turned out to be surprisingly easy! I was shocked how simple it is to turn cream into butter. Just pour whipping cream into a blender, and blend it until it breaks. The only difficult part is trying to squeeze out any remaining liquid from the clumps of butter. And the leftover water (containing whey and small clumps of cream), called buttermilk, tastes pretty good.
I really should have made this before.
Making Butter from Mark Hamzy on Vimeo.