Panoramas: Not Just a Fun Word to Say

Early Morning Light on Lake Hodges

I'm breaking my own post template for this one, and asking you to make sure your browser window is wide enough to take in the full photo above. Go ahead and resize it now, I'll wait...

That's the joy and the problem of panoramic photos. They're HUGE! In fact, it's difficult to properly display them on a website due to their size. This particular image has a wealth of detail, even in the back lit hills, however, due to its overall dimensions, I can't display it large enough for those details to be seen.

In the olden days of film cameras, a specially formatted panoramic camera to be done seamlessly. Now, with the advent of digital photography and the magic of Photoshop, creating a panoramic can be done painlessly and without a special camera. This particular image is actually 6 images, taken in horizontal orientation shot about 20 minutes before sunrise, and then "stitched" together in Photoshop.

Panoramas can be difficult to plan, since you can't see the entire image in the viewfinder at once and minor shifts in camera position can cause insurmountable perspective distortions and, as seen above, the vast scope of the image often encompasses very different lighting from edge to edge. Despite the difficulties, they can be truly rewarding to capture, especially when they turn out like this one!

See more of my panoramas here, in the appropriately title Panoramas gallery.

Soft Light, Soft Water

Long exposure after sunset, looking at the Ocean Beach Pier.

I love long exposures! There's a bit of mystery in long exposures as you can never tell exactly what you're going to end up with. You can guess and try to envision the effects of the increased exposure time, but you'll never know for sure until you see it on you LCD screen after the shutter closes.

Case in point, this photo was a 30 second exposure about 30 minutes after sunset. It was taken the same night as End of the Day and the image for 12 Minutes Makes a World of Difference, back in mid-April. As I set up for the shot, the sky was already a deep dark blue, edging quickly towards black but I knew the long exposure time would allow my camera's sensor to pick up the last remaining bits of color in the sky. What I didn't know was that I would end up with such nice, soft pastel colors in the sky.

I also expected the waves would be smoothed out quite a bit. My hope was that I wouldn't lose all definition in the ocean, but I couldn't have predicted the reflection of the pier's lights on the smoothed out waves. The reflections of the lights wasn't apparent to the naked eye that night, probably because of the motion of the waves, but once the motion was taken out of the equation, those reflections were allowed to shine.

Finishing up Projects

Merced River Reflections

I had a dramatic flurry of new photos and posts at the end of last month/beginning of this month and not much since. My time has been filled getting some other projects taken care of as well as finishing up some behind the scenes type things for the website.

Notable changes to the website:

• The blog (www.chrisskopec.com/) now "stretches" and fills the screen as you change the size of your browser window. And it now matches the photo site (photos.chrisskopec.com) a little better providing a more seamless transition between the two.
• If you're so inclined, you can now leave comments on photos. It's a feature I turned off a while ago because I wasn't happy with the way they looked in the old layout. Now, with the new layout, they can be hidden free up more screen space for the photos. To find the comment section, click on a thumbnail to see the photo larger then click "Show Details" at the top of the page to bring up the Comment/Keyword box and you can comment away.
• I've been adding keywords and captions to publicly viewable photos. It's a slow process and isn't done yet, but the hope is that these will help my images be even more findable through Google and other search engines.
• Are you a friend or a family? Check out the new "Friends & Family" section of the site. These photos are not for the general public, but recent changes from SmugMug (who hosts my photo site) allowed me to password protect the whole group so you only have to put the password in once. The password shouldn't be too difficult for friends but if you have trouble just let me know.
• And last but not least, I've created a "Best of our National Parks" gallery. The images here are collected from the various individual parks galleries in an attempt to group the best of those images in one gallery. The image above is from the new gallery and can still be found in my Yosemite gallery along with the rest of the images from my Yosemite trip.

Coastal Rocks/Wave Explosion Combo |B&W|

The previous 2 images combined.

This image is a combination of the previous two shots. Still no interesting sky, but since the exposures and black & white treatment were identical, it was easy to combine them and use the best of both for one image.

 

According to some folks, this photo is a lie or at least cheating.  I would argue that I didn't create unnatural circumstances in this image and therefore have not cheated and since I'm writing about it, clearly not lying either. Both parts are realistic and this particular image probably occurs naturally. I couldn't capture it in one image when I was there because the waves weren't coming in fast enough. By the time a wave was coming ashore, the previous one had already dried out, leaving no reflections.

 

In the end, whether it's cheating or not, I think the resulting image is greater than the sum of its parts!

Wave Explosion |B&W|

An "exploding" wave.

Last Friday's photo and this photo came just seconds apart at Crystal Cove State Beach/Park. Both were shot about a half hour before and 180 degrees from my Sunset at Mordor Beach image.

These rocks were lit up with a nice warm, golden glow as the sun set behind me, unfortunately the sky was a flat grey due to the cloud cover. Much of our day here at the coast had been overcast with uninteresting skies and despite my previous follies with black & white images (as mentioned in my last post), I planned for these images to be black & white. Or at least solid attempts at it.

Since the sky was so uninteresting in this direction, I slowed down my shutter speed to catch the motion of the waves and create an interesting element in the foreground to draw attention away from the sky. In the previous image, shot as a wave receded, you can make out the reflection of the rocks in the wet foreground sand. In this image, the next incoming wave hit the smaller rocks with a good amount of force. The slower shutter speed caught the full "explosion" of water created by the wave slamming into the rock.

Both images can be found in my Just Black & White gallery.

Coastal Rocks |B&W|

Coastal rocks at Crystal Cove

I don't create a lot of black and white images. There I said it. And if you want proof, take a look at my Just Black & White gallery. (I know, I need to work on the title for that one. It's not very imaginative is it?) There's only 6 images in there. And while there may be a few others floating around my site that need to be included in this gallery, that only works out to 8 or 9 images out of the nearly 500 up for public viewing!

The reason? I'm still trying to figure out how to do it. "But black & white imagery has been around forever! What are you trying to figure out?!" I hear you asking. Well, even though black & white is where photography started, that doesn't mean it's easy and it all boils down to color theory and the contrast between different colors. What shade of gray should this blue be? How about that blue? And this red over here, what should that look like? It's all subjective and entirely up to me to decide when making the conversion.

Photoshop offers a myriad of tools for creating monochrome magic (new gallery title?!) and each allows you to precisely control what shade of gray individual colors should be. And that's part of the problem for me. There are just too many options and I would much rather be out taking photos on a nice day then experimenting in Photoshop.

This image is the result of a fairly quick and easy method I recently invented (and by invented I mean, I thought about trying it only to discover it's been around and on the internet for quite some time now). After checking the various color channels, I found the red channel in the RGB spectrum held the best looking image and deleted the green and blue channels, resulting in a monochrome representation of the information held in the red channel. A contrast adjustment, some sharpening and a little dodging to further improve contrast and the image was done.  For such a simple process, the results are rather nice, if I do say so myself!

Sorry to bore you all with the technical talk, more information about the location will be in my next update.

12 Minutes Makes a World of Difference

Just after sunset at Ocean Beach

Taken just 12 short minutes after the image in my last post, End of the Day, this image has a completely different look to it. With the sun now completely below the horizon, what was a 1 second exposure for End of the Day became an 8 second exposure for this image.

The added exposure time allowed the waves to blur even more than the previous image. At this exposure length, the majority of the waves and motion in the water has been smoothed out and is nearly unrecognizable. The effect is somewhere in between the two points where I'd like it to be. In End of the Day, the waves show quite a bit of motion blur but still hold definition. At the other end of the spectrum is Only One Way Out, an older image that shows the effect of a 7 minute (yup, minute!!) exposure. The water is completely smoothed out and lacks any real definition. Those two extremes are where I'd typically like the water to be in all of my images.

However, I don't mind the in between look in this image because this image is more about the different conditions in such a short amount of time after the last one. Notice the sky color, no longer a golden, burning orange. With the sun now well below the horizon the sky has picked up a nice pinkish glow. Also notice the rocks in the foreground. They aren't the exact same rocks, of course, as I moved and found a new composition in those 12 minutes, but look at the difference in the color of the rocks. In the previous image they glow and reflect the sky's golden orange. These rocks, without the direct angular sunlight, look much more menacing and uninviting.

While this image is quite a bit colder and may not be as "pretty" as the previous one, I propose that it is no less interesting. It's amazing how much a scene can change in just 12 minutes...

End of The Day

End of the Day - Sunset at Ocean Beach

I shot this image about a week and a half ago on the first evening my friend Jay was in town. We grabbed a quick bite to eat at Southbeach so Jay could try their legendary fish tacos then took the short walk to the beach to shoot the sunset.

The beach part of Ocean Beach isn't much to write home about photographically speaking. It's more or less just a sandy beach. But just a bit south of the pier, the beach quickly turns to pock-marked sandstone. That's good news for a couple photographers looking for interesting foreground subject matter. With the sun low in the sky, the sandstone picks up an amazing golden glow. When the sun is very low (as it is in the image on the right), only the top ridges pick up that glow, creating an interesting contrast between the lit up ridges and the rest of the rock.

This is a single image, no multiple exposures or blending or even Photoshop trickery. What you see here is largely what came out of my camera. I achieved this single exposure by using my graduated neutral density filter along with a graduated blue filter. Placing the darker regions of the filters over the sky allowed me to effectively darken the sky enough to capture the sky and relatively dark foreground all in one exposure. Typically, only the graduated neutral density filter would be used for this purpose, however I've found that no matter how "neutral" the filter is supposed to be, there is still a noticeable color shift when using it. The blue graduated filter doesn't reduce the exposure by much, but it does tend to shift the colors back towards reality.

Reducing the exposure for the sky, meant using a longer shutter speed to get the proper exposure. That's something I see as a happy side effect, especially along the coast. With a quick shutter speed, the water is frozen in place, but the longer exposure allows the water to show its motion. The wispy, flowing water shown is the result of longer exposure and begins to hint at the forces of nature that shape this part of the California coast.

Please Excuse Our [Digital] Dust

Ghost Tree - A never before posted favorite from 2009

Regular visitors to chrisskopec.com should have noticed a rather large change recently. For quite some time, the landing page for chrisskopec.com was a nice little slide show filled with some of my favorite images. If you got past the slide show and looked around through some of the links, you'd eventually find a link to my blog, which contained plenty of nonsensical and infrequent ramblings about where I had recently been along with a couple photos. It's all been switched around now.

The slide show was beginning to lose its appeal to me the more I looked at it. Despite having some of my favorite photos in it, it was largely devoid of content. It wasn't easy to update, so many new photos no matter how good they were never made it there. I didn't like the random feel to having vertically and horizontally oriented photos rotate through, so the slide show featured only horizontal images, meaning a good vertical image (like the one here on the right) would never make it to the front page. And worst of all, the blog, which was intended to be a major connection to the world was buried deep within some drop down menus. (Plus, the slide show was starting to feel very much like a cheesy flash intro and I don't know anyone who actually watches those anymore.)

Now visiting chrisskopec.com takes you straight to my blog solving a few problems all at once.

• Findability - OK, I admit one of the major reasons for the switch is a selfish reason. Having an active blog is a key to being relevant to internet search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing...). When the blog was buried, I hardly posted at all. By making it the front page, I'm forcing myself to keep posting and keeping the blog active and hopefully more findable for new visitors.
• Better Writing - No more rambling, half-incoherent writing allowed! I'm restricting myself to a set format for each post (with a few exceptions for major photo trips) which is one photo and a short description of it.
• More Photos - The new format I've set up, allows for both horizontal and vertical images so I'm no longer restricted to just one type of image. That means each new post will feature the best of the best, not just the best landscape oriented image.

And before this post begins to ramble, I'll wrap it up by saying that while the switch has been mostly implemented, there are still a few links to fix and minor inconsistencies to clean up so in the meantime, please excuse our [digital] dust! :)

PS - If you want to get straight to the photos at any point and skip the blog, they can be accessed directly at photos.chrisskopec.com.