HDR from a single RAW (continued)
Following my recent trip to the local museum, I’ve decided to write about the advantages of shooting HDR from a single RAW file using Photomatix Pro. If you are interested in this technique, please read my previous post ‘HDR from a single RAW‘.
First of all, shooting traditional HDR using your camera bracketing mode may prove extremely difficult, especially in low light situations as well as inside buildings. The picture below was shot with 1/25s, which is already a rather slow shutter speed for handheld photography. Creating brackets with your camera means that for overexposed brackets the shutter would have to be approximately 1/10s and that will definitely blur the image due to camera shake. Obviously, you can use a tripod for this kind of pictures but most places won’t allow you to use one for various reasons. Secondly, carrying and setting up your tripod every time you want to take a picture is also troublesome. Instead, you can capture one RAW file and then process it in Photomatix Pro. You don’t even have to create brackets yourself. Just open Photomatix, go to ‘File’ then select ‘Open’ and indicate your RAW image. Next, select the right settings and Photomatix will process the image and you still will be able to adjust the settings to get the desired effect. The results can be seen below.
Time-Lapse Photography
Time-Lapse photography is gaining increasing recognition to the extent that this technique continues appearing in mainstream motion pictures on a regular basis and there is plenty of great examples on the Web. No photography blog would also be complete without an entry revealing the basics behind Time-Lapse Photography. Therefore, this post will discuss numerous aspects of Time-Lapse Photography including equipment, technique, processing and workflow in order to bring you closer to shooting your own Time-Lapse clip.
What is Time-Lapse Photography?
Basically, time-lapse is a photography technique that involves taking a series of photographs, maintaining the same interval between the shots, and then compiling them into a slide show or a movie clip. This technique is ideal to demonstrate events that usually take substantial time to develop in a relatively short period of time. Numerous examples of Time-Lapse Photography include blossoming flowers, growing plants, rotting vegetables and fruit, changing weather, moving clouds, cityscapes at night, night sky as well as city life. What makes this technique even more interesting is the fact that by increasing the intervals between the shots, it is possible to demonstrate unnoticed events that take time, in seconds.
Here are some of my examples of time-lapse projects shot both at night and in the daytime.
Notice how fast shutter speed and relatively long intervals made the video quite ‘choppy’.
Here on, the other hand, smaller intervals made the video flow better.
Finally, longer exposures taken at night create impressive trails of light.
Also an example of a time-lapse project made form video rather than picture files
Vertical Panorama
Vertorama / tiltorama (see comments for details) simply stands for a vertical panorama and it’s one of the best ways to capture interiors. If you are not familiar with panoramic photography, please read my previous post on Equirectangular Panorama to get yourself familiar with the stitching process.
Shutter Experiments 