China Travel Etiquette Photos, Videos and More
Here is a shot of the famous lighthouse right up the road from Costanoa on the California coast. It was shot with a Nikon D3, again, using HDR by using three photos. No tripod was used, but because it can shoot up to nine NEF (raw format) pictures per second, shots like these turn out okay.
Just got back from Costanoa and we took this shot of the sunset. There was some sort of movie or television production going on right behind us at the lighthouse.
Used Photomatrix Pro to HDR merge the levels, using a Nikon D3 — I think we shot five NEFs, bracketing the exposure by .3 to .5 each stop — so that would take about 1/2 a second to shoot five photos.
Took way to long, only reinforcing the fact that I still need a book or something. But now I have my stock 450px template for photos. This is a cha hua, anyone know the name of it in English? I thought it was the camellia? They were on sale in Chuxiong, Yunnan last month, some for up to 100,000 RMB.
Photoshop CS3’s Photomerge feature is the best. No tripod needed. Auto-stretch option. Just set your camera to Manual mode, shoot RAW, get a reading of the sky and set shutter and f-stop accordingly, pan across the area you want to shoot, shoot 1 or 2 stops under 0, stitch it together in PS3, flatten layers, in Levels (RGB screen) move the top right slider over to the left to the “end” of the histogram, crop the shot, don’t fret if there are white spaces in the shot, once it’s cropped use the Transform tool and click the “warp” feature to move those white spots out of the shot and BOOOOOOOOOM, you got a panoramic like no one else.
I hiked up about 400 feet above where we were staying and got myself in (I believe) a little wheat field, set up the Italian tripod, manual setting, exposed for the sky, and shot six portrait shots.
PS CS3 stiches them together very well, much better than CS2. This is the result, just to give you an idea of what the rural part of China looks like.
I’ll be posting GPS coordinates soon.
After this latest trip to E Jia I took about 800 RAW format photos. Now I’m faced with the task of selecting a few, editing them, exporting, creating galleries, making prints, etc. I’ve found that by converting them to DNG format I can save space while keeping the RAW format options available.
Adobe DNG Coverter is a useful app to “compress” your RAW files down a little (but keep the RAW functionality) and at the same time is creating a standard for all those different camera types.
Some stats: DNG compressed (loseless) some NEFs down about 35%, and some CRW down about 18% (average of 800+ files).
I found a detailed web site explaining the benefits of DNG.
onOne’s Mask Pro 4.0 is hella cool. Masking software, I know, it’s been around forever, but I never used it until now (someone was showing it to me when it was still Extensis, and it was cool then.)
It has about a 5-minute learning curve, but if you watch their online tutorials, it’s very easy to use and works very well. Their tutorials are inline with what I would make if I were a developer trying to sell software. Anyway this app is very useful, well worth the $150+ USD.
I hope these two little apps will help me along with this major photo project.
See Photoshop CS3 Beta Bug Page
Maybe this is useful for PS developers at Adobe. Will keep it updated as I use PS.
Update: Get the latest news about the bugs in Photoshop at Adobe Labs.
You remember the PS CS2 tutorial I just finished? The same guy (Deke) teamed up with Lynda.com, an online training subscription website, and goes through most of the new features of CS3, step-by-step, in the same fashion as the tutorials I watched. I can’t believe they’re giving this away for free! I just watched the new Photomerge in CS3, coupled with the new Warp function, and yes, it is about 100 times better than even CS2.
VIEW PANORAMIC PHOTO OF DALI
ENLARGE