good morning everyone back in Dallas again this morning I am here to do an
exterior shot Museum is back over there and we're going into a building up here
if this weather will hold out it's awfully cloudy
I have to say the parking
situation downtown could be much improved
and less expensive
that ended up going really well it is overcast out here but it's not
completely overcast and I actually think this ended up working pretty well I was
convinced we were gonna have to come back out a second time and reshoot but
we got it of course that's up to the client
so I'm obsessed with the idea of lunch here so got a kill a little time first
but since we have a minute to kill I'll show you where we are this is actually a park
that is built over a freeway when I was a kid growing up for years we referred to
this as the canyon because it all just went underground well they built a park
up at the top and it's surrounded by the Arts District on one side on the other
side you have hipster expensive apartments there's like two restaurants
in here that are excellent lots of mirrors here's the museum I worked in
for seven years is it just me or do these two sculptures look like bird sh…
whole slew of food trucks and some more food trucks that's the opera hall and
behind that is where I went to high school you can sort of see the Symphony
Center back there this new building whatever that is is now in the way
sculpture center Asian Art Museum
Oh tough choice here or there
we're going to the Phoenix
enchiladas check
time to head back to the fort you know
in the last vlog a lot
of you complained about the highway footage and yeah it's a long drive
between Dallas and Ft Worth but just for you guys we're gonna cut to the chase I
won't do highway footage today mainly because I forgot the dashcam I need to
work on that - I need to like pimp this car out so like when it gets a little cooler
we'll find a cooler set up for this but anyway let's go ahead and head back to
Fort Worth right now
no… wait
oh, not yet
there we go so let's go in and see what we got
oh these guys
I'm a construction magnate
like seriously it follows me everywhere
okay so essentially this is an urban landscape so my plan here was to end up
with a composite image that had the maximum depth resolution that I could
possibly crank out of this and so what I did was a series of images that are
stitched together in Lightroom at the end and I'll show you how to do that in
a second the lens I chose for this is the Zeiss Loxia this is the f/2 35mm
it is a Sony mount it is incredible and so essentially what I do
is go through and just do a series of three or six images that are just side
by side that are going to be stitched together in the end now the key to this
is making sure that your exposure is identical on every one of these images
so what you want to do if you want to do this is go through and find the
brightest spot in your image and sometimes with landscapes you've got the
Sun in there you've got to find that and you've got to expose for that and then
that's the exposure you're going to use throughout and I'll explain how we get
into this in Lightroom next thing you're gonna want to do I'm going to show you
how to do this in Lightroom is you're gonna want to actually apply any lens
correction profiles that Lightroom offers if that's a possibility there are
some cameras like Panasonic and Fuji for instance that do it internally in-camera
and that's fine you can just use them straight off the camera but if you're
using something else like Canon Nikon Sony what you want to do is go in and
manually select those lens profiles and what that will do is it'll help you with
them in the vignetting and any distortions that you have and it'll make it easier for
the algorithm to stitch those together okay so we're in Lightroom now and I
want to make a couple points about this image first of all as I said before this
is not the client image and the reason I'm telling you that actually there are
two reasons that it will get to but first of all this is shot the opposite
direction from the landscape that I was actually shooting for the client they
asked me what my preference of time of the day was and it was kind of a favor
that was called into a business that has two floors in this high-rise on the
other side and I said well we want to shoot it in the morning knowing where
the sunrises and knowing where the building is and they said fine and so before I left
I did a couple shots so I could use the same technique to illustrate to you guys
in this video but it is shot in the opposite direction I was in a hurry and
it was overexposed and you can tell because if you look in the sky here
you're seeing some blown highlights so I didn't have time to bracket this at this
point because the priority unfortunately was not doing this video it was doing
the job for the client but I want to show you at least the process but the
point I want to make though is that even though this was overexposed
a lot of it was recoverable because of the settings that I chose to use so you
can see what I used over here this is actually the final stitched panorama it
makes a dmg file and this was one sixtieth of a second at f/8 at ISO 100
and the Sun is right here over the Chase building so but you could still see even
though that it was somewhat backlit I was still able to recover a lot in this
image and that is a key because there are two things that you have control
over when you're shooting basically an urban landscape or any kind of landscape
for that matter the first one is ISO and ISO as most of you guys probably know is
a metaphor in the digital world for what we dealt with in film sensitivity and so
typically if you're gonna get the most detail the most information out of the
image that you possibly can you want to shoot at the cameras base ISO now that
may be very conservative by today's standards because cameras are really
good with higher gain settings or higher ISO settings but anyway I shoot at the
base ISO and the other thing is I definitely wanted the lens at f/8 that
it's just it looks really good at f/8 everything's sharp you could shoot at
f/16 this lens doesn't have the aberration problems that some lenses do
but anyway f/8 was my choice so the shutter speed is all I'm left to deal
with and we're shooting into the Sun and if this were the shot that I were trying
to get this is not the time of the day that I would have tried to get it which
was in the morning so anyway with that being said though this is the final
stitched image and you can see that there's a lot of detail even if i zoom
in you can tell it retains a lot of detail and I wouldn't have chosen this
time of day like I said to shoot this particular image this is the opposite
way the way I was shooting but anyway just to tell you how I did this so this
is basically a stitched panorama based on six images that I took and so if you
go look at the original images here they are so real exciting here but you can
definitely tell that I'm slightly overexposed with that sky blowing out
but when you do these you want to create enough of an overlap so that Lightroom
or Photoshop or however you're stitching these the algorithm can tell what's
trying to be stitched together and so it needs information that is similar in
each image so if that makes sense so they need to overlap slightly is my
point if they definitely don't overlap it can't invent it the image that's not
there so you're gonna have a problem so what you basically do to do this is you
select all six images and you do control+m
and it's going to bring up a panorama
merge preview now there are three choices you have here in algorithms and
they are spherical cylindrical and perspective and these are based on how
the image is mapped out and so it could be very different if you're using a
drone to go in a spherical pattern anyway so you want to choose the correct
one the correct one in this case because I'm simply just like hand holding this
and just moving the camera over is going to be perspective of course if you click
on any one of these you can see a preview so you can always experiment
with it from there and then what you want to do is just click merge and I've
already done - I'll say cancel and it will give you a DNG composite of those merged
six images so what you end up with is very much a higher resolution image than
your camera and of course I'm using the sony a7s on this and so that's kind of
part of my thinking on this if I had a higher megapixel camera the original a7s
is only 12 megapixels you know feel free to go wild but in my case I have
a lower megapixel count and I want a really high megapixel image in the end
and so I could have gotten even higher than this there are different ways you
could go about it but I really love this whole concept of working with composited images
so that is essentially my approach to landscape photography I am a
big fan of stitching in this instance because what I want to do is be able to
retain the maximum amount of detail that I possibly can out of a single image
even though it's six all stitched together but it is a cool technique and
if you want to try it yourself remember it is really important to get things
right in the camera before you do the stitching in post and when you're kind
of going around you want to find the brightest area of the image and make
sure that you retain those highlights and I know this was kind of a weird
example because I was doing something for a client and so that's where my
attention was and then I wanted to have something to share with you guys so I
kind of flipped around the opposite direction which was not ideal and I
didn't get the time to bracket it appropriately but you get my point the
main things that you want to remember to have your camera at the base ISO that
is really important because any gain that you start to introduce will start
to degrade the image quality somewhat of course in the modern age this is a
little different than it was 10 years ago the other thing you want to remember
is to have your aperture set at f/8 this will avoid any
kind of aberration distortion and it's also not too shallow so you won't have
any depth of field issues okay so one other thing that I want to mention is I
am NOT Joe Landscape and don't claim to be and I want to recommend you two
channels on YouTube that definitely are although I wouldn't call them Joe
Landscape the first I want to mention is somebody that I've known online for
years his name is Ben Horne he has an amazing channel he does
behind-the-scenes and vlogs he shoots film shoots eight-by-ten if you've never
seen an eight-by-ten negative or positive you are missing out I've only
kept to Ben's channel in the show description make sure you check that out
another gentleman I would highly recommend is Thomas Heaton and if you
haven't seen Thomas he does a lot of vlogging a lot of behind the scenes on
how he's getting the shot and he goes to some really amazing locations both those
gentlemen are awesome check them out I will see you guys on Monday we have
photo assignments and this week is going to be really good so until then I'll
catch you Monday later
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