Thursday 18 April 2013

a stitch in time

and you should never under estimate the benefit of a fresh piece of cloth.

So while you can sometimes make something with stitching things together, you can't always use stitching (or HDRI) to make up for the short comings of gear.

Conventional "wisdom" out there at the moment seems to be use image stitching techniques for making your wide angle lens wider (or your normal a wide). Such as this image ...



This image was made with a mild telephoto and stitched together from 5 images taken in portrait to make a highly detailed wide format landscape.

Sadly however this doesn't always work, as nature often is not as patient as me and spoils things by moving.


So when I tried to align these two images the churning clouds have moved between images and re-orienting the camera to make adjustment difficult / painful / tedious or plain old impossible. The above image was (as it happens) taken with my Bessa I on two sections of 6x9 film. I wish I had of had my 6x12 camera and a 75mm lens.

Sometimes there just is no substitute for one take.

1 comment:

h said...

If you're willing to lose a little detail around the join, the spot healing brush in Photoshop can work wonders (kind of automates the laborious cloning I used to use for such things). This is very roughly done just to show what I mean: http://200ok.com.au/img-open/roughly-patched.jpg ...that's about 30 seconds with a big brush, it would take a few minutes longer to follow the threads of clouds more closely.

You're right though, nothing beats a single frame. Even my little pocket cam's sweep pano feature can't keep up with fast moving clouds.