You see, he had been plotting not only sunsets but moon rises ever since the Scott Kelby Walk back in July, and knew that tonight would be a particularly good night to catch the moon rising over the skyline of the city both because of its position, and because it was a clear night with very few (if any) clouds in the sky.  Apparently Gregg had been using the Photographers Ephemeris application for a while now (available in desktop versions and iPhone versions as well), and his research was spot on.

A few other decent apps are available for the iPhone/iPad/iTouch crowd (both free and paid), including the popular Sunrise Sunset Lite application which works nicely except for azimuth and elevation.  Still, for free, what can you expect?  Get TPS – it’s worth its weight in gold!

For those that use the Android operating system for their smart phones, try the Sundroid application from the AppBrain marketplace: Sundroid Free Sunrise/Sunset for Android on AppBrain

We walked away from the short outing (only an hour or so) with several good compositions to add to our respective portfolios…only now I owe him a beer.  Well worth it for the following:

Moonrise Over Denver

Happy shooting and have a great weekend!

Stanley Lake

Let’s take a quick run through some of the settings:

On starting the application, you will be presented with several tabs, Project Assistant, Source Images, Control Points, Exposure/HDR, Preview, and Create Panorama.  I only really used the 1st, 4th, and last tabs to process this image, but that’s primarily because PTGui was able to align everything for me.  If everything wasn’t decently aligned during capture, you’d likely have to add control points to the program to account for variations.  So, getting it right in camera does still count!

Tab 1 – Project Assistant

Step 1: Here’s where you import your images – the cool part is that PTGui can take raw files so you don’t need to lose any image quality by running through another program first…(look for a post on how to export to PTGui from Lightroom some time next week).

Project Assistant Tab

It’s pretty straightforward here – simply click the button to load images and your file browser will open…navigate to the folder your raw files are in and select the ones needed for the pano.  The program will likely detect your lens used from the exif data, but if your lens does not look correct, simply uncheck the “Automatic” box and enter the correct information (this was taken with the Sigma 8-15mm, so I changed mine – sorry no screen capture there).

EXIF Data Settings

The next part is the fun part – if you are bracketing your exposures correctly, PTGui will detect that and ask you an important question when you align the images in Step 2.

Step 2: Align Images – If you are not shooting HDR, this step is a lot simpler, but for those that enjoy HDR (even subtle HDR), this is of particular interest:

HDR Options

So, the deal here is that if you are shooting your bracketing handheld, you do not want to link to the original images.  I’m not sure what the distinction is, but according to PTGui instructions, that’s the best course of action.  Naturally, the converse holds true as well…if you are using a tripod, I guess it’s safe to link to the original images.  So, use the one best suited to your needs, and proceed with the alignment – PTGui will analyze and align everything for you (this is the stitching portion):

Aligning Images in PTGui

One the images are aligned, the Panorama Editor window will open – here it shows you how everything is overlaid to create the pano – use this as a reference point, and if things look good (they should, I’ve not experienced a scenario yet where I’ve had to deal with control points), you can close this editor:

Pano Editor

Tab 4:  Exposure/HDR Settings

Step 3: Now, move to the Exposure/HDR tab.  Here is where you’ll enter the tone mapping settings to define how the HDR image will look once flattened and saved so you can view it in a regular program.  You can choose from a True HDR option (which is the one I used) or Exposure Fusion.  Give both a whirl so you can see how things differ…as I said, I like the True HDR version myself, but your mileage may vary:

HDR/Fusion Tone Mapping

The options for adjusting your tone mapping has a basic and advanced tab.  I leave it on the basic tab and just tweak the slider settings for compression, brightness, radius, saturation and contrast to taste.

HDR Options

Click OK to go back to the main window, and move to the last tab in the program – Create Panorama.

Tab 6: Create Panorama

Name Your File: You’ll want to give it a descriptive name so you can find it easily because once this is done a final step will be needed to crop your image so it looks right.  Also, if you want to have access to the HDR reference file, make sure in the output options, you check off both tone mapped and HDR panorama.

You are all set, it will now warp and render the final files for you.  Warning:  This is a pretty resource intensive task as up until now we’ve been using thumbnail views to define our parameters – now it has to use the original files and both stitch and render the HDR reference file.  If you are using your computer for other tasks as well, things may slow down a lot!

Once the final output jpg is created, go into your favorite image editor and crop off the black areas to finalize the panorama image for either print or web.

PTGui panorama

So, there’s the process.  I know, there’s many other pano processing programs out there, and all have their pros and cons.  What struck me as the biggest advantage is the ability to process both panorama and HDR image stacking at the same time.  For those interested in learning more about PTGui – they have a free trial download, and the program itself is very cost effective considering what it can do for you and your work flow.  There’s a personal license for $109 US and a Pro license for $206.  I’d recommend the Pro version.  Check it out here:  PTGui

Got your own personal panorama software preferences?  Share your thoughts on the pros and cons in the comments area – would love to hear what others are using and what their work flow looks like.  Enjoy the post and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!  Happy Shooting!

For instance, I was working on the photos from the weekend shoot and had a rather good set I wanted to put into a panorama shot.  Before taking the good set though, I decided to run a test on some older images on a new program that came  which came recommended to me from Alex Saunders over at Tenuous Thread called AutoPano Pro.  So, in working with the trial software, I went into Lightroom and grabbed my 12 or 13 photos to stitch together from my archives and see how it did for a test run.

Well, because the stitching of 12-13 images can take a while, I left it and came back the next day to find I had grabbed one of the wrong images.  Can you find my “oops”?

Here's the edited version

Pre-post production

So, my foibles and failures in attention to detail thrown wide for the world to see!    It can be fun though when you look at these things lightheartedly and just have a good chuckle though.  Anyone else have any stories or foibles they want to share?  Comments are open…

First off, thanks go out to Rob Jones of Towner Jones Photography for another nod from his blog.

I’d also like to pay special thanks to Dave Cross of NAPP fame.  I saw a pretty big blip up on the blog from about a week or two ago and when recently looking at Google Analytics, saw he had given me a mention from his blog back on Dec. 1st.  Thanks so much Dave, and although it’s been said, it’s worth saying again – my thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.

Lastly, shouts to fellow NAPP member Mitzs who also gave me some link love on her blog, Pursuing Photoshop!  Thanks for that!

And now, for the POTD entries, I was able to contribute to Jason Moore’s ongoing Geographic Composition series which is featured on his blog today, so here’s that photo:

And last but not least, since I got the 10-22mm lens (finally, after a year or so of debating which wide angle to get) on Friday, I was playing with the zoom and looking at the angle of view when my dog came right up to the lens the other day.  Instinctively, I snapped the shutter.  The aperture was wide open and the shutter speed was way to slow so the image quality is horrible, but the image itself is just hysterical.  Her name is Maggie, but we call her Moo for short.  So, in honor of her, I am closing today’s post with her:

Happy shooting, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

As some of you may recall, Scott Kelby held a worldwide photo walk a few months ago to promote his new book that was coming out on Lightroom 2.  Well, since then several smaller photo walk clubs and groups have formed and begun their own outings.  Denver was no exception and our first official photo walk this last weekend had a really good turnout of roughly 15-20 people.  About half of us even got together afterward at a local eatery to share stories and get to know one another better.  Everyone is posting shots over on the Meetup site and at the Flickr site as well, so stop in there to see some of the talents showcased in those venues.  The shot above is a pano I stitched together from the occasion.  With more photo walks to come, this definitely has some positive energy about it.

So, you’ll notice that the color on these is a little off, and the exposure is a little dark. I realized that I would have issues though, if I tried to expose for such a wide scene and range of colors across the entire panorama, most especially when trying to use the Photomerge function of Photoshop. So I set my White Balance to cloudy, my exposure to one frame, and just snapped across the image.

Here’s where it gets fun…I am running CS2 on my Mac laptop which cannot read my 40D files. My CS3 was set up on my Windows desktop. The Dell only has a 2.3 Ghz Celeron processor with 1.5 GB of RAM (I never got around to adding that last 512 before the move…). Needless to say, without being set up right, I really couldn’t process 8 shots each at 10MP (that’s a grand total of 80 MP in the final pano)! Even now with the portable AC on the Dell, it was screaming along as I ran the Photomerge utility through Bridge. Once I got the photomerge done, I stamped the layers (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E) and converted to a smart object.

I then double-clicked the smart object to edit in it’s own window. This image file was now at 480 MB! Needless to say, I did some layer adjustments for exposure, and curves, then saved the file. I was now back in the full pano composite. I saved the full pano as a PSD file, then flattened before making some downsizing. For the curious, the full size pano is over 8000px on the long side. For the purposes of the web, I did have to downsize it a little. Clearly downsizing to allow the blog to show it would be out of the question, so here’s links to a large sized version (1600px long side), and a xl sized (3200px long side).

Large Pano

Extra-Large Pano

So, here’s the question: was it worth it?