This is a record of my progression through the course 'photography 1: the art of photography'.
I will post past and present photos with information and personal comments as the time goes but more importantly the projects and assignments as course demands. Please post some critic, as i intend to upload good, bad and lots of ugly pictures.
I am planning to finish the course as fast as i can, maybe before November. My main goal is to capture balanced compositions, and in the process develop my techniques .
This panoramic i put together today was taken in dartmouth, devon on the 26 of may 2010 at around 1:30 pm. the sun was hiding behind some white shaped clouds and it was kind of chilly at around 15 Celsius. we ( me and my girlfriend ) had been driving on our last holiday day break in paignton where we were staying and decided to visit the castle of the lovely 11th century coastal town of dartmouth home of the britannia royal naval college, and conveniently a town of many yachts. the road where i am positioned is the castle road away from the main area in the town and leading to the defensive dartmouth castle at the entrance of the mouth. this frame is a stitching of 12 photos taken at 18mm handheld as i was in a hurry and too lazy to run around with a tripod. the camera used was a nikon d200 with a nikon nikkor 18-200mm vr lens on manual mode at 1/100 with the vibration reduction on and aperture at f/11. the iso was set to 100. The frame was merged on photoshop without much fiddling just a bit of saturation 18%. A tiny bit of increase on curves, i just pushed the white level a little. I also did a bit of sharpening, i used the unshapening mask at: the amount of 100%; 0.7 of radius and with the threshold left at 0.
Why did i decide to go for a panoramic picture? - maybe for the wrong reasons. I was in front of a beautiful and unusual landscape and my lens couldn't take the full view as i could. The scene as i was seeing was an harmonious composition of a lot of things, one complementing the other. I couldn't decide on what should be left out. So i selfishly crammed it all in.
Why did i use this equipment at this settings? - Because i measured various points of the landscape at f/11 for maximum dept of field without compromising the image. having already set the iso at 100 thats the maximum quality for my camera. I monitored the shutter speed readings and worked out an average for the manual settings as i wanted the final record of the combined images to be of the same values for a smooth merging. The equipment used was the one i always use on the go, for portability and versatility.
did i like the end result? - it's ok ish because i managed to merge the photos on a good way there are not many converging verticals or horizontals to give away the realism of the image. And the fact that it was shot at 18mm didn't render the the centre of the image too small for impact as i was close to the subjects and that helped. I also like the colours and the clouds as they give a sense of dept to the image helping on a towards a 3 dimensionality if i can say so. on a more negative side i don't like the fact that the white boat in the centre is trimmed and too close to the edge of the frame. I would have loved to have a bird or the moon on the superior right third to also balance things up, but i'll try next time.
