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New
Photographer Tip:
Photography for the the
Holidays
  
...From our Winter Collection at
Photographers
Direct
Just a little planning will
greatly improve your photography over the Holiday
Season. Here are some hints:
Capture the
preparation stages.The actual holiday meal or
party is obviously the best part of the day, but there
are other photographic opportunities, particularly in
the preparations stages of the day. The shots before the
event starts properly are often great because they show
everything at it’s best before everyone descends on your
party zone.
- Food preparation (see ginger bread house
above)
- Putting up decorations
- Christmas light displays and outdoor winter
scenes
- Wrapping gifts
- Kids getting dressed in their Christmas
outfits
- Setting the table
   . ..From our Winter Collection at Photographers Direct
Before and After
Shots. Speaking of shots before the party
starts, why not set up some before and after shots both
of the place you’re holding your party and what it looks
like afterwards. Make sure you take the shots from the
same position. Set your digicam or video
camera on a tripod and take a series of time lapse
photos over the day - great results and great fun.
Enthusiast Photographer
Tip Panoramic Images
False Creek, Vancouver, BC ..from a series of
7 images. Blending the different layer tones here was a
2 hour project!
In the film world, panoramic images were
created with large expensive pano cameras (the lens
would rotate across many frames) or
with gintzy film cropping techniques in
disposable APS or point and shoot film
cameras. Creating great panoramic images in
the digital world is easy but watch for some common
problems.
Nodal Point
The rotation of your camera on a tripod or hand
held to capture a series of panoramic images often
creates weird distortion effects making stiching of a
series of images cumbersome. Distortion or parallax
errors ocurr because the true centre of the camera,
optically speaking, is the nodal point and not the
actual camera rotation point. The distortion effects are
more pronouced if your panorama subject is closer to you
and are less noticeable on long distance subjects. The
nodal point varies with the lens and focal length
and is often somewhere in the lens region and ahead
of the handheld or
tripod rotation point. The tripod screw,
the rotation centre of the tripod or your body and the
nodal point are unfortunately never the same. The best
solution is to move the camera backward to match
the nodal point to the rotation point. An unsatisfactory
solution is to severely crop the stiched image to
elimate the distortion/parallax gaps. To find the
nodal point of your camera visit this useful and
informativeweb
site . Once found, you can use an expensive
nodal point adjustment holder (several 100's of $)
or invest a few dollars, like I do, in a
metal nut, bolt, metal strip and tripod screw to
move your camera backward on a tripod.
Polarization, tone and exposure changes
while rotating the camera.
Rotating a camera with a polarizing filter
results in severe tonal changes (eg, with a blue
sky) and the different exposures when light
comes from a low angle creates havoc when trying to
stitch amd merge your images together in
your stitching software. Try using the new panorama
stitching tool in Photoshop CS3, Not only does it match
the image edges well it automatically blends the tonal
changes as well. The result is a big time
saving - what can take 60 minutes in earlier versions of
Photoshop, now takes just seconds! You might as
well get your credit card ready, visit www.adobe.com
from the southern Coast of Chile . .from 4
images. More work on tonal blending needed
here
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