panorama

All posts tagged panorama

At night…

Posted by Arno on September 21, 2013
Posted in: color, lightroom, long exposure, nature, object, photography, Photoshop. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a Comment

…
Did I mention this before?

Last night I was up late. I looked outside, and I stared into this absolutely breath-taking view. It was close to midnight. Overcast to some extend, very foggy at the ground. But there was an almost full moon lighting up the fog and cloudy part of the sky. That in combination with the light pollution coming off the city and some of the street lights along the path…
I stood there (on my balcony 😉 ) for quite awhile, just looking at it.

The picture below is a panorama of 5 pictures stitched together in Photoshop.

Night photography

5x D800, ISO100, 30sec @ f/8, Nikkor 70-200mm

Good morning…

Posted by Arno on April 25, 2013
Posted in: color, nature, photography, Photoshop, weather. Tagged: , , . Leave a Comment

… said he in the evening…

I won’t say any more… Other than that in a few weeks from now I will be looking at this from the hammock on the balcony (if I wake up early enough, that is 😀 ).

D800, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/2, Nikkor 50mm. 3 images stitched in Photoshop.

D800, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/2, Nikkor 50mm.
3 images stitched in Photoshop.

Disappointed, but not beaten, yet…

Posted by Arno on April 24, 2012
Posted in: color, nature, object, photography, Photoshop, travel. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

So… That was a disappointment… Beautiful day the entire day, and everything down the drain because it turned overcast in a few hours.
Ok, maybe not everything down the drain, we did get some good pictures, but still. We didn’t get what we actually came for.
That called for another night on the town. We were back at the hotel around 23:30. And so it appears that IF anything happens in the city of Tromsø, it doesn’t happen before midnight. We went to the same place as yesterday, which was actually full with people. Not so different from Finland, I must add, since there were a good number of them well beyond there quota. It must’ve been an expensive night for them.

We didn’t make it a long night, since we had another long day ahead of us. Last chance, as we were homeward bound the next morning. The weather forecast was good according to several websites now. We woke up in our brightly sunlit walk-in closets and that set our moods in the right direction 🙂
Today’s route would lead us around Hella, Bakkejord (the area where the first boat pics are from), and Sommarøy back to Ersfjordbotn, which is a typical place where many people before us have shot the Northern Lights.

Hella, Norway

D700, ISO200, 1/500 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 14-24mm

Near Sommarøy, Norway

D700, ISO200, 1/500 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 70-200mm

Bakkejord, Norway

D700, ISO200, 1/500 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm. 180-degree panorama built from five images.

Near Sjøtun, Norway

D700, ISO200, 1/350 sec @ f/9.5, Nikkor 50mm. 180-degree panorama built from five images.

Near Sjøtun, Norway

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/16, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND filter

Near Sjøtun, Norway

D700, ISO200, 20 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND filter

In Norway things were looking up

Posted by Arno on April 21, 2012
Posted in: color, macro, nature, object, photography, Photoshop, seasons, shapes, travel, weather. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

After our first day of scouting we were sent to different bar, a place which was THE place to be on a Tuesday (!). Well… The place was positively buzzing with about 5 people. So after a few drinks we headed back to the hotel, tired from a long day of driving in the rain. We did check up on the weather forecast, never giving up hope that the trip to this godforsaken country, which was called The Paris of the North, where a drink costs you an arm and a leg, would be a total miserable loss. And guess what? Out of the 5 websites forecasting the weather for the Troms area one actually mentioned a clearing up for the next day. Of course with all our hope we fully believed that one website and with sunshine in our hearts we withdrew in our walk-in closets and called it a night.

Lo and behold… We woke up to patches of blue in the sky. We couldn’t believe our eyes!
Another day of scouting ahead, and bring out the sunglasses!
Tourist information told us we would better be heading east for the night, where the sky would be the clearest. Near Tromsø things would be clouded over come evening, so no use to stick around there. So off we went, in the direction of the Lyngs Alps, a mountain range east of Tromsø, topping just under 2000 meters. We drove all the way to the east tip of the island, to Breivikeidet, there where the ferry leaves to Svensby.
It was there were we set up “camp”.

Breivikeidet

D700, ISO200, 1/500 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 50mm. A 180-degree panorama put together from 10 images.

We had plenty of time to kill before sunset and darkness, so we got acquainted with the area a bit.

The beach in Breivikeidet

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 50mm

There was an actual beach there. I’m not quite sure how often per year you could actually lie on the beach this far north, but pretty it was. And the water… Shockingly clear…

The beach in Breivikeidet

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 50 mm

(I didn’t position them like that…)

Sea urchin on the beach in Breivikeidet

D700, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/8, Tamron 90mm macro

And some more landscapes:

Gletcher on the island of Svendby

D700, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/16, Nikkor 70-200mm

My buddy spotted a totally unexpected guest when he was standing here: a seal! Unfortunately he didn’t manage to get a good picture of it and it took off too soon. I managed to only get a glimpse of it from where I was standing 🙁

My buddy Alan

D700, ISO200, 1/125 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 70-200mm

And they had boats, too 😉

Breivikeidet

D700, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 50mm

Breivikeidet

D700, ISO200, 1/350 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 50mm

And while we were waiting for the darkness and the night to set in, which it finally did after us spending about six hours in the cold there, we saw happening what we were dreading already for a few hours. More and more clouds came in and what was supposed to be a clear night was about to go all wrong.

Breivikeidet / Svendby

D700, ISO200, 10 sec @ f/16, Nikkor 70-200mm

It ended up clouding over so much that we decided to get away from here and hoping we would drive towards some lighter skies.
On our way back, for just a brief moment, we thought we saw something over the mountain range, but we didn’t capture it on sensor. It might’ve just been our eagerness…

Somewhere along the way from Breivikeidet back to Tromsø

D700, ISO200, 15 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 14-24mm

A guy’s world of oblivion, Day 84

Posted by Arno on December 10, 2010
Posted in: black and white, color, photography, Photoshop, seasons, weather. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Same shoot as the post from yesterday. This is a panorama stitched together from 5 images.
(The sky was totally weird that afternoon, can’t really put my finger on it, but it just looked odd).

Panorama

D700, ISO200, 1/125 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 50mm, 5 images stitched together in Photoshop (original file size 11955 x 2778 px)

Even with the white balance on daylight the originals came out totally blue. I had to do some serious color tweaking and desaturated the blues almost completely to get this look like a clean snowy landscape.

The market’s ignorance in a guy’s world of oblivion, Day 35

Posted by Arno on October 22, 2010
Posted in: color, object, photography, Photoshop, stock, travel. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a Comment

As if cheap thieves like iStock and Shutterstock and other microstock agencies aren’t bad enough to destroy the photography market, and you always have to read the small print on any competition to make sure that you’re not basically handing over the copyright of your images, the thievery has also entered the local markets. I was made aware of a competition called “Helsinki City Photo Competition”, organized by the city of Helsinki, apparently.
And the rules:

All images that are uploaded to this group can be used in Helsinki marketing: on our websites (vxxxxxxi.fi and mxxxxxxi.fi) and in advertisements, brochures and in other promotional material.

Please submit only high-resolution pictures. Low-resolution images will be neglected in the competition.

Please note: by uploading images to this group you accept that images can be used in Helsinki marketing and will be distributed via Helsinki City Material Bank (*).

Where the (*) refers to the text

The photo material in the Material Bank can be used for promoting Helsinki either directly or indirectly, as well as by members of the press and for free publications. Information about the photographer will be included.

So the city of Helsinki is creating themselves a nice little archive of Helsinki images and are generously offering to include information about the photographer. They offer a whopping 3 gift certifcates to Pixmania to the best 3 images of their choice, and the rest of the archive they – and the rest of the media – get to use for free.
Sorry, but that always gets my fluids boiling. These kind of things should really be made illegal by law and people who submit to these kinds of contests, should be made aware how this is pretty much f**king up the photography industry.

I have a stack of Helsinki images, but they’re not getting any from me. Unless they purchase a license, of course.

Helsinki skyline seen from the harbor

D700, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/16, Nikkor 70-200mm. 7 images stitched together in Photoshop (original file size 11276x2719px)