Scenes from Victoria Beach

[janis]

I finally got down to the lake the week before last to practice some landscape skills. I played with my polarizing and GND filters, with varying degrees of success, and I finally made a halfway decent panorama. I am looking forward to this coming long weekend and the opportunity to correct my many mistakes.

These are a few of the images I have processed thus far.

1) A 3-image panorama shot with my 35 mm and stitched with Hugin. I wasn't thinking about composition so much as the mechanics of making a panorama. Even so, I forgot to put the camera on manual. Oops.



2) This was shot with a polarizer. I don't plan to ever leave home without one again.



3) This is one of the few images from my superzoom lens that I actually quite like and makes me think maybe I will hang on to it after all.




4) Wirefox chided me about all the twigs I left in my first edit, so I took them all out, and refined my cloning technique in the process. (Thanks, Steve.) There are some artifacts remaining from my first clones that I will deal with at another time.

[jeeperman]

Nice series Janis. I think #3 is my favorite, however I might lose most of the blue sky. All that is required is a sliver and thus gives a more pleasing composition, for me anyhow.

[janis]

Thanks, Paul. I'll give it a try.

[chrisc]

Which super long lens? I agree with Paul on the edit and on #4 might consider a square crop with no foreground.

[janis]

The Nikkor 18-300 mm. It is soft at a lot of focal lengths and plagued by chromatic aberration. I have been wanting to replace it with the 24-70 and the 70-200 f/4, but can't quite justify the expense at this point. Maybe when my skills are better.

How's this for a crop?

[Stevewebb]

I like the crop much more Janis. Great job.

[nickjohnson]

Janis, good stuff – the crop version is just the job.
About the lens and the CA. Did you know that there is software that will automatically take care of that for you? I've use DXO for several years now – and since they have a profile for all my lens / camera combos - I just forget about CA. The current version of Lightroom has auto lens correction too. There is also at least one stand alone software package that does similar things.

[Stevewebb]

May 15, 2013 14:46:56 GMT nickjohnson said:

Janis, good stuff – the crop version is just the job.
About the lens and the CA. Did you know that there is software that will automatically take care of that for you? I've use DXO for several years now – and since they have a profile for all my lens / camera combos - I just forget about CA. The current version of Lightroom has auto lens correction too. There is also at least one stand alone software package that does similar things.

Good advice Nick. I understand Janis' problem though as before I got the 70-200 my zoom was a 75-300 and the CA was so bad at full reach that no software could touch it. Maybe the software has moved on enough now to clear it up. Hmmmmm I feel an experiment coming on

[janis]

Thanks Nick and Steve,

I do have CA correction tools, including PT lens, but I would like to be taking care of it at the top of my workflow and in RAW. All of my other tools require me to make a TIFF file. My RAW editing tool is Aperture 3, and it does allow manual correction of CA, but I find it is very slow to resolve adjustments of the slider and so it is no fun at all. If Lightroom handles this automatically and in RAW, that is a very strong point in its favour.

[The Wirefox]

I won't mention the disappearing twigs in the last one then

As you know hat is my favourite. Simplicity...it just gels and I can keep going back to this and it still has the same impact.

[janis]

Thanks, Steve. It's my favorite of all the shots I took that weekend.