Lessons

Lesson Info

Multishot Techniques

Now this photograph was not, well I did not stitch this together, nor did I have software that stitched it together directly. This was shot in-camera with multiple photos, and there's a lot of photos and a lot of the phones will do this. You just do this sweep across the area, and it will stitch things together. And so there's a lot of these SLRs with interchangeable lenses, mirror less cameras that can do this now. And so you can get 180 degrees, if you look on the left and on the far right of this image, you can see the actual road that I was standing on. And so this is very convenient but it is not as good as the traditional technique that I just explained prior to this. And the reason is, is if you are shooting anything that moves, because of the way that it's firing the images, you have to be very careful. Now you do have to be careful manually stitching things together anyway. But these tend to get things a little bit more mixed up when they move around. I wanted to try shooting ...

Seattle, this is a different view of Seattle, but if you look carefully in the water, you can see the actual slices from the different photographs. It does not do well with moving water. This is difficult with any technique, so this is just showing up very very clearly, and some of these slices are not as sharp as the others because I wasn't holding the camera as steady during that particular photograph. Now in this case, the movement of the water didn't really matter, because it was just a blurry area. And so if your camera does have in-camera panorama stitching, you do need to kind of plan and practice and it's a little bit like a golf swing. And so it's good to swing from the hips and you kinda wanna see how far you have to go. And so one of the common problems it's kinda like working with a video camera on a video head. And the big problem is I wanna pan over here, you kinda didn't realize it's that far. You keep stretching, stretching and you should figure out where it's comfortable at the end and then go back to the start. And so I found that some cameras are very particular about that's too fast, and that's too slow, and you have to find that exact sweet speed that the camera likes to work with. And it's kinda nice when you just want a quick snapshot of that particular location. But if you really want the high quality one, you should probably shoot stitched regular full resolution images from your camera. The double exposure is something that excited me when I first learned about photography when I was shooting slide film, being able to take two exposures on the same piece of film was kind of interesting. And then when Photoshop came around, and it's just two different layers in Photoshop, it became much less interesting to me. Ah but the concept would be for instance you shoot a photograph of the moon with a fairly strong telephoto lens and then you shoot another photograph where you might want the moon in that particular photograph. And in-camera now a lot of cameras have this ability, you can have the camera combine those two together. Now it has a fairly strong impact, looks like a very impactful picture. I really dislike this photo. This is probably the photo that I dislike the most that I probably like some of the out of focus pictures we did in the out of focus section. More from this one. And it's because it's an obvious double exposure, it just looks very fakey. And if you're from Seattle, you would know this is fakey just because there is no place that you can get to where you would actually shoot this photo. And it just has kind of a fakey look to it, and I'm not really into it but I just wanna explain that it is another concept out there of shooting. Now a different type of multiple exposure technique is something that I call the people filter. And anyone who does travel photography knows the desire. I mean I would love to have the Photoshop power. If you can think of a superhero, I would like to have the superhero Photoshop power of deleting people that I see. I would like to delete that person from the scene that I have set up. I don't want to harm them in any way, but I just don't want them in the photograph. And so I'm set up at a scenic location where there's other tourists wandering around taking photographs. And I'm kinda waiting for those people to, those groups to move out and so I can have a nice clean shot. Well if you work with a tripod, and the same exposure and the same focus and you take multiple photos, eventually the people move for the most part. And then what you can do is go back and selectively take the sections where those people are and find the photo where they weren't and you can clone in these particular areas. And what you need to do is you need to really have the camera in exactly the same position, and so now you can get a shot of this location without any people there. So that is one way of doing that. It's slightly deceiving, but this is what it looks like without people there. And so if you want to do that, a few little tips for, for this. You need your camera in exactly the same position, it's not gonna work out, it's gonna be very difficult to get things matched up handheld. It is conceivably possible, but very difficult. Everything needs to be manual, it's just like one of the panorama shots cause they're all combining to make the same exposure. And you want to shoot as many shots as necessary, but don't shoot more than you need to. Cause you just, if you need, if you can do it in three, keep it at three. And then just be really aware of who's in what spots and how long are they waiting there and are they eating lunch or when are they going to move. And then you can use Photoshop or other problems to mask them out. And I, when I'm out shooting, I seem to attract other people around me that like to stand still. I was up shooting the tulips and there was a couple, and they were talking back and forth and they weren't looking at the tulips, they were just, they weren't arguing they were just talking back and forth. I'm like is it possible you could move in the next 10 minutes, just a few steps. That's the type of people that attracted around me. It's amazing the people that I have in my photographs. Okay, HDR stands for high dynamic range. Another great way to get an argument started at your photographers get together, alright. So high dynamic range is a technique that was developed in the advent of digital when we realized that we couldn't capture an entire exposure with one shot. Now you could think well maybe what about the split neutral density filter? Well that's gonna darken this foreground element, and that's not supposed to be dark. We have one exposure that does the sky and the mountains well, and if we combine the two of them, we can get an image that is matched appropriately between all of them. And so this is pretty much the way that your eye would see that scene. And this is something that has become a little bit divisive among photographers. And you'll find people who either embrace HDR photography, some they love it and that's all they do. And there's other people that don't like it cause they say it doesn't look natural. And so it is a strange concept because we can't replicate what we see with our eyes, but we're trying to in photography. And this is one of the ways where we can bridge that gap. And the really, in my mind it's not just two worlds. There are three different types of worlds. There's non HDR work, which is straight traditional work of we've seen. There is HDR for the glorification of HDR, where it's trying to make an image look just unusual and surreal and it kinda looks like it's something coming out of a video game. Really boosted colors, and that's what's really divisive for a lot of photographers. It has a cartoony effect, they're not even trying to show what it really looks like. They're just trying to create an image that has a lot of impact. And that's perfectly fine, you know you create an image a lot of impact. And then there's a spot in between where you are technically trying to solve a problem. And HDR is a tool for technically solving problems and if it's done in a very careful balance, nobody's ever gonna know. And my problem with this photograph is that this is kinda the way that my own eye would see this. But this isn't the way that my eye is used to looking at photographs. And so it kinda looks a little uncomfortable. And so I'm basing, this is very personal for me. I'm basing what looks good in a photograph as to what I expect to look good in a photograph. And this is, this is new. This is not what I was trained to look at and say is normal in a photograph. And so I have a slightly different calibrated level of what looks good to me. And everyone gets to make their own choice as to how much they do to their photographs and what they think looks good. But it is a tool for solving problems. In this case there is no way that I can shoot directly into the sun and get a proper exposure with the sun. Along with the foreground elements which are in the shadows of the sun. And so by shooting a bracketed exposure, we talked about bracketing in the exposure section. I shoot another exposure that has the sun and the sky and the background a little bit more closely or better exposed. I combine the two of those, use a computer program or manually work with them together to get a little bit better combination. Now this is where things get really touchy. Is getting that balance right, getting that look right. And I am not an HDR photographer. And it is gonna be a long time before you see a John Greengo HDR class. I just don't have that much of an interest in it. I kinda come from a photojournalist background. I like to get things kind of straight in-camera. There's a number of cameras that I have that have HDR in-camera built in and it's just horrible, horrible results I've seen. I have seen photographers get much much better results by using good software. And so Photomatics is kinda the default software that's Photomatics. That's the best software I've seen out there and I've seen some photographers who do some really good HDR stuff use that software. There's other programs that do it as well. Lightroom does it, Lightroom does a terrible job with it in its current version, it just doesn't work for me at all. But different, different ways of using it. But it is a tool definitely to be aware of and give it a try, just go out, even if you don't want to do it, I don't want to do it. But I'm gonna go out there I'm gonna shoot a bracketed series and I'm gonna give it a try to see if it works for something here and there. And I occasionally shoot bracketed photos with the thinking that some day down the road, I'm gonna want to work with that in some sort of HDR function. So I'm not completely putting up a brick wall between me and HDR. It's a tool and I'm more than willing to use a tool if it works. This is an in-camera HDR and we have HDR 1 and HDR 2. HDR 1 doesn't see too much but HDR 2, if you look at that image on the right hand side and you look under the dock over on the right hand side, you can see how much more into the shadows we can see. Because it's collecting different exposures and it's kind of pulling out information in those different photos. Here is an example of the HDR that I have in my camera. It has a natural setting, it has an art standard. It has an art vivid and an art bold. And what it's doing is it's lightening up the shadow areas and it's trying to hold back the bright areas you can see here in the background. And so what I said is what would I normally do if HDR just didn't exist? Is I would go to the raw image and I would work with the raw image. I would look at the shadow areas and I would lighten them up and either I would select the highlighted areas in a multitude of ways and I would try to darken that up. And so just by going in and adjusting a raw image, I have found that I've been able to make virtually every change that I have wanted exposure wise in an image with a raw image and not have to go to HDR images. I have found that HDR is sometimes used, sometimes used as a crutch by photographers who have chosen to work with really bad lighting. Now that sounds very mean towards them, but in some cases they're just choosing a lighting situation that is very very difficult to work with. And maybe my point of view is I would just wouldn't work that lighting because it's not the right lighting. And they're, they're exploring new territory. But I have found that when you have really good lighting, you generally don't need HDR. It's in really challenging lighting situations where it becomes helpful. We talked about this in the focusing section, so this is just a quick review. But sometimes you're not able to get the depth of field that you would want, and this was the case of the tree down in California. I shot it with multiple shots, I forget how many. About eight different shots at slightly different levels of focusing, so that I could get everything in focus in at least one image. I would then take all of the images and get one really nice sharp picture, and that's focus stacking. There's a number of tools that will help you actually focus the lens if you get into this on a very very high level. A little micro motors that will actually turn the focusing of the lens for close up photography. Or even landscape photography.