A lunchtime wander exploring the South bank of the River Clyde with some of my work colleagues.
You probably have gathered from the images on my site, that creating panormas (vistas) and virtual realisties by stitching multiple images together is one of my specialities. So I decided to do an experiment with three images shown below that I took of Lola at Portencross Beach.
And I am quite chuffed with the result.
Now how did I do that?
Anyone can do this! It’s easy. But be warned, you’ll need an awful lot of wine. To start off, I select the images in Lightroom, right click and select Edit In – Merge to Panorama in Photoshop which seamlessly launches Photomerge from Lightroom and saves the result back to the Lightroom catalogue.
In the Photomerge dialogue, there are a few options, but I just leave the settings as default. In my experience, Photoshop will either do a wonderful job or makes an absoluate hash off it, in which case I simply refer back to using PTGui Pro. In this case, Photoshop came up with a perfect stitch.
Then kick off the photomerge, open a bottle of wine, and poor yourself a glass. When your glass is empty, just refill it. Go on, have another glass. Take the whippet for a walk. And, yes you guessed it, have another glass. When Photoshop finally completes the number crunching, this is the result.
Then a suitable crop. Unfortunately, a few bits are missing in this case, requiring a little cloning work. Had I used a slightly wider focal length, a crop would have been sufficient. More crop in this instance would have lost part of the reflection and would have taken away any space (sand) above Lola.
Finally, another glass of wine to celebrate the result.
A lunchtime wander exploring the Clyde Tiger on the North bank of the River Clyde with some of my work colleagues.
The first weekend of the summer with scorching sunshine. After a day roasting in the garden on the Saturday polished off with lots of wine over a bbq, what else could one do except head to the nearest beach on the Sunday. Well, maybe not the nearest, but Portencross Beach is our favorite, and certainly one of the best within easy driving distance, reasonably quiet with spectecular views across the water to Arran and on a clear day even to Ailsa Craig.
The tide was well out, making the beach enormously wide, with wonderful stretches of rocks containing puddles, and bright green sea weed. Only the second time we have been on a beach with Lola, and boy, did she love it. Mooching through the seaweed, paddling through the puddles and waves, chasing and being chased by other dogs, rolling on a dead seagull and harassing typical Glaswegians for blackened sausages from their bbq.
These few images hopefully illustrate the whale of a time Lola had. She was so tired after running ragged that she slept all the way home in the back of the car, which is very unusual, and was even quiet during our second bbq of the weekend. I admit this is a blog entry with whippet overload, but hey, the images are wonderful if I may say so myself.
It was very hazy, and without polaroids, Arran was not even visible. I will have a look through the landscape and intimate landscape images taken that day, and dedicate a future blog to these if they are worthwhile sharing.
The Clyde Tiger is a very impressive mural to promote the Chines Year of the Tiger. It was created by The McFaul Studio and forms part of the Tiger Beer’s “Tiger Lucky Eight” promotion. The mural can be found along the Clyde Walkway on the North side of the Clyde just East of the King George V Bridge, and can be spotted from any train crossing the Clyde on their approach to Central Station.
Although I had walked along Clyde Street a few times in the preceding weeks, I would not have spotted this mural if it wasn’t for a tweet from a fellow photographer. So after checking it out on Thursday with a test shot, I headed back at lunchtime on Friday with my tilt and shift lens and tripod. The main image is constructed from two images, one shifted left and one shifted right, using my tilt and shift lens, then stitched into the letterbox format measuring a massive 30 million pixels.
I will add a page to my Insight pages soon with the detailed steps I went through on site and in post processing to get this great image.
Convert virtual reality of the Clyde tiger to html and insert
This virtual reality hopefully gives you a good appreciation of the location of the mural and it’s size. Below are a few more images, noting that the second one was taken with a fish eye lens, and the last one similar to the first one, but with some titl to attempt to blur the foreground and background. Unfortunately, I didn’t get it quite right, as it hasn’t worked out the way I wanted it to be, so I’ll have to get back there next week to try again.
As promised in my previous blog entry Life is a blur here are a few intimate landscape images, or visual poetry if I may plagerise Colin Prior, from our Sunday afternoon’s wander through Mugdock Wood. I love this time of the year, with lovely detail and colours in young budding plants and flowers. The main image of a tiny purple pine cone offset by the young green needles is my favourite.
After a glorious Saturday spent mostly reading the third novel in Stieg Larson’s Millenium trillogy in the sun in our garden, Sunday morning was a bit of a let down with heavy clouds and the odd light shower. So we decided to head into the woods for a wander off the beaten track after lunch. We had hoped for fields of blue, but unfortunately, the bluebells in Scotland appear to be out at least a week later than the England bluebells shown in glory on the web by others in the past week.
Thankfully the weather had improved quite a bit, so we ended up wandering through the woods with a mixture of sun and cloud. We started of from Drumclog Car Park, but headed due North across tracks through the woods rather than following the main track to the West. On reaching the edge of the woods, where the ground dips down to the swampy grass fields, we headed West, but when the opportunity came, we crossed the fields to the other side, crossing little streams meandering through the fields.
On reaching the path that leads down from Mugdock Castle to the West highland Way, just above the old gamekeepers cottage, we followed this well paved path down to the West Highland Way and Allander Water. A welcome opportunity for Lola to have a paddle in the river before heading back up along the tracks through the woods and back to the car park.
The light was wonderful and provided good opportunities for landscape photography. The images of the afternoon ranged from landscapes (vistas) to visual poetry (intimate landscapes) and abstract photography. In the absence of enough bluebells for a typical blue landscape image, I decided to experiment and make the most of the few bluebells in bloom. Using a slow shutter speed and moving the camera downwards while pressing the shutter button, I created some pleasing abstract results.
I used the same technique to take some abstract images of flowering broom and birches framed by fresh green grasses. I am pleased with the results, especially the mian image of the birches. The last image included is a reject, where I failed to get the camera movement and pressing of the shutter button coordinated. hopefully this will give you an impression of the few bluebells amongst the green grasses that form the basis of the abstract bluebell images.
A future blog entry will likely include the landscape and visual poetry images from this delightful wander.
Our usual Saturday afternoon walk is always and eventful time for our little Lola. People and dogs galore, and with a bit of luck she can steal some bread from the children feeding the ducks in the river. Nothing is better than splashing in the river, fetching sticks, running circles around ‘slow’ friends and chasing or getting chased by ‘fast’ friends.
The weather was dry but very overcast this afternoon. Trees are budding, but strangely enough and lots of blossoms coming out in the West End gardens, but no blossoms out along the River Kelvin yet. So I just spend an hour throwing sticks and shooting Lola running into the river and clambering back onto the river bank. Then Cara, a bouncy Visla, joined us for the usual dog chases.
While out playing in the back lane with Lola, I tried to get some action shots of Lola jumping for the ball. So I tried to throw the ball with my left hand and shoot with my right hand. Man, this is way too difficult. I kept throwing the ball against the wall or in the bushes.
The one above and the four below are the best one of about a dozen I took.
Our first walk along the River Kelvin after our two week holiday in the sun and Lola’s 18 day sleep over in Largs. Lola has lost a little weight (and is looking in good shape!), but has not lost her interest in fun, running and ripping sticks to bits. Although it was overcast, it was still a very nice afternoon for a wander along the Kelvin Walkway. The heavy rain overnight had turned the place to a mud bath, but all the more fun.
Lola was having a ball, running with dogs, running circles around other dogs, splashing through the mud and waters, fun digging in an existing hole and ripping reeds and sticks to bits.
While Lola was having fun in the nud, I spotted this little dipper flying from stone to stone on the side of the river. I managed to take a few shots, albeit not the best, as I had to crop a tiny portion of the original taken with my 70-200mm. In fact these are at 100% size, by cropping 800×533 pixels from the original 21mp image. Quite pleased. Need to keep my eyes peeled and bring my bigger guns the next time.
In the end… home to a warm shower.
On the way back from Arrochar/Tarbet, we left the dual carriage way for a detour through Bowling and Old kilpatrick. Bowling is a place you just want to drive through, but Old Kilpatrick appears to be a nice little village.
We went for a walk along the Forth/Clyde Canal and stumbled on this little nature reserve called The Sailings. A bit of land between the canal and the Clyde in the shadow of the Erskine Bridge. It’s amazing how high this bridge actually is when you stand underneath it.
The walk along the shore of the Clyde, through grasses, across a wooden walkway and along the canal, was a welcome wander. We even spotted two deer from the wooden walkway, but unfortunately they were too obscured for some decent shots.
A place to come back for a wander, although the big drawback is the continuous noise from the dual carriage way along the hill and on the bridge. It’s a bit like the noise of wind in the top of the trees above you, but then car noise.
We drove up to Mugdock Wood for some fresh air and to let Lola tire herself out. Both a bit fragile and tired, partly down to a bit too much Rioja on Saturday night and partly down to the time of the year and the ‘wear and tear’ of work. We really need a holiday to recharge the batteries. The weather wasn’t great, very dull and grey with the odd flurry of snow. So my lack of inspiration was matched by my bland surroundings.
I decided to put my 100mm macro lens on the camera and restrict myself to look for ‘intimate’ images in the landscape, forcing myself to move around to compose rather than being lazy with the usual zoom. Very frustrating to start with, as I wanted to switch to my wide angle zoom on various occasions, but I persevered. Halfway through the walk, I started to think I would return without taking a single image.
But the approach paid off well as you can (hopefully) see from this set of images. Not only did I start to see opportunities in the chaotic forests for close ups, I also started to experiment with small apertures and shallow depth of field of the lens. Although I had the tripod with me, I happily took all these images handheld at ISO 800 and shutter speeds of 1/30 or thereabouts, certainly testing Canon’s acclaimed four stop Image Stabiliser to it’s full.
This is the first time I’ve really tried this lens in the field, and wow, I’m well impressed. Not only does it deliver outstanding images in the ‘studio’ for macro photography of jewellery (the main reason for buying this lens in the first place), it is proving to produce very sharp intimate landscapes and, more surprisingly, very sharp action shots. I’m bowled over how well the autofocus snapped on instantly with these two grab shots of Lola at full speed.