Nature Photography

No, I wasn't thinking you adjusted the color.  You have a white sky in the gaps of the foliage, except for one that's a bit yellowish -- and that obviously is the sun.

Here’s a perfectly good, if dull, macro photo of a seed head of a blade of grass.



ColorGrassCam

To my eye, I thought this would be something that would present itself better in black-and-white. I used the conversion tools in Affinity Photo to do so (it’s an easy and fun process). Then, seeing it in black-and-white, it immediately occurred to me that a faux sepia tone would look good. Here’s the finished product:



SepiaCam

I surprised myself how good this turned out.

Here’s a forest panorama made up of four shots. You shoot with overlap so the stitching software has something to work with. So maybe this is the equivalent of about 3 finished shots stitched together. And that still makes if a very wide angle lens indeed.



Forest Panorama Cam

If you have a fairly widescreen monitor (as I know Artler does on his iMac), it looks pretty cool. And it seems to stitch it together fairly well. I haven’t searched with a fine-toothed comb for anomalies. I wouldn’t doubt that there are some. I think even better (or at least predictable) results could be achieved mounting a camera on a tripod and then rotating it evenly on the horizontal axis. But it’s nice to know that you can achieve good results even without a tripod.

I clicked on both panorama links, and certainly couldn't see where one shot ended and the next began.  It looked like a single shot.  What was KFZ saying yesterday about how we can no longer trust photos?

Here’s another forest panorama using Affinity Photo to stitch several separate shots together:



Forest Panorama 2 Cam

This is a more modest panorama and is perhaps approaching what you might achieve with a ultra-wide angle lens.

Here’s a panorama looking roughly northwest toward the Olympic Mountains with Hood Canal in the background.

It was pouring rain when I started up Green Mountain this afternoon. But it tapered off the higher I went and eventually we got some partial sun.

I was standing on a stump to take this one, twisting my spine as evenly as I could as I tried to keep the camera level as I moved from extreme right to extreme left. Even so, the overlap was only fair so I had to do a bit a cropping. And that’s just part of the process.



Hood Canal Panorama Cam

My new iPhone SE 2020 with the built-in SmartHDR is doing a fantastic job of exposing those skies. It’s pretty much what you see with maybe the camera enhaning the blues just a bit.

Let me show you an ultra-wide panorama made up of ten shots. There’s quite a bit of overlap between shots so maybe that works out to about 5-1/2 frames wide or so.

And I left this uncropped so that you can see the raw stitching process. If I had held the camera perfectly level while panning, there wouldn’t be that empty white space top and bottom. But the stitching software has to move, stretch, and compensate for your imperfect leveling and so you get the gaps.



UltraWide Cam

Here’s a panorama of a yuge hill of foxgloves.



FoxgloveCam