Getting Closer...

I'm getting closer to my goal with the D100, which is to produce a quality, DRAMATIC picture of a well-worn subject. I'm going back to thisplace next Thursday or Friday to include real live PEOPLE in the shot.

I'll be just south of the Opera House walkway, near the north-end of the Toaster (for anyone who's intersted). While Mike Spinak talks about knives, machetes and survival, my main problem with taking pictures at Sydney Opera House is... parking.

God, it's hard to find a friendly parking spot in Sydney nowadays.

nice exposure, good sweep of view. I woulda raised the tripod to include the top of the left-most lamp, and then a little breathing room beyond it. It looks like it would have been possible with out losing anything significant on the bottom. That would have been a taller tripod, not a tipping of the lens.

Good point Doug, but (gotcha!) I have an answer...

I took "considderbal time" over framing that dang lamp-post. I decided to crop it in-frame because I had way-too-much sky over the Bridge and the Opera House (by the way, Sydney Opera House is singularly unsuited to the staging of grand opera). To reduce the empty sky over the aforementioned constructions, the lamp's crown had to go.

So I had to limit the tilt of the camera (4-something degrees) at the start of the panoramic (i.e. the LH side, including the lamp-post) in order to keep the blank blue sky under control above the buildings, the Bridge and the 'House.

I guess my point is: I DID think about it, in fact I hadda wait for 90 minutes for the light to get right. Forgetting to bring my toilet-seat reading material with me (currently Isaac Asimov's Atom... an oldie, but a goldie), I had nothing to do but smoke cigarettes, twiddle with the whathisname controls on the D100, chat to the Mexican tourist guy who wanted to know all-about-digital, and WORK OUT EXACTLY WHAT MY FRAMING ON THAT PARTICULAR LAMP-POST WAS GONNA BE.. specifically... deliberately...positively...par-TIC-ularly that lamp-post.

Trust you to pick holes in the one thing I really, REALLY thought-out in this shot.

Doug, you're a legend. And, I believe I owe you an email.

Great colors, excellent focus, aesthetically pleasing shot that was well executed. Nice job

When 2 legends meet...:-))

By the way, very nice shot... Getting closer indeed. Great angle... Hope you'll get an even more than more dramatic sky next time...:-)

I'm sat here drooling at such a fabulous picture! Brilliant!

... AND YOU can go there next week again, would love to be there once ;-) But summer is coming back also here... THE LAMP, mmhhhh I may would think also on this but would forget to the other million of things... The horizontal line is nearly in 50% of the image - mmhhh - may be some dog on the right side next time and a very-little more space in the lower would enhance this image ? I realy like the blue tones here which we find on the flor also (and also in the restaurant-umbrallas)

Great work! I love panoramas.

This concept is still a work in progress. I think it needs lots of people milling about. Sunday night dies about 5 pm (and it was cold and windy... even the ferry service was cancelled due to 5 metre seas as they went past Sydney Heads). "Al fresco" dining became "al freezo".

 

Marc's comment about the sky hits on the nub of this kind of photography (from my limited experience). The "bright" parts of the sky were actually quite dark. It was well after sunset. But my exposure was 8 sec, f9 at ISO-400 setting, and just about anything that's got a glimmer of light in it comes out looking like there are searchlights traversing the sky.

 

An earlier shot had nice orangey sunset hues fringing the clouds but a drab foreground. So the problem here is to keep the sky muted while bringing out some of the subtle dark detail in the buildings (the REAL problem is that the camera doesn't have the range, which was - from memory - 7 stops between the brightest part of the sky and the darkest part of the water).

 

Unless I'm doing something radically wrong, or missing the point altogether, you have about five minutes in any one day to take a picture like this: in between the last rays of indirect sunlight from over the horizon and pitch darkness (I did take another shot after, but it came out too muddy in the sky over the buildings). You have to take what you can get.

 

It's an awful long time to wait for your opportunity - parking, walking a mile or so with a heavy tripod, looking like a goose standing there rehearsing (to the bemusement of the peripatetic tourists walking by), with enough imaging gear to find Saddam's WMDs, half-freezing to death in the meantime. That's why (once again, as Marc suspected), I call this "Getting Closer...". There's a better shot here - but everything has to be perfect in the few moments you're afforded for the actual exposure.

 

There is also a problem with the spotlighting of the Opera House roof. In my opinion it's a bit too hot. In situ, with a human eye, this lighting is actually quite soft, but the camera really ramps it up, given the long exposure. Even though I reduced the exposure for just this frame of the panorama, it still burned out. That's a problem to solve another day.

 

I've seen other work of this genre in Europe, and (come to think of it) the skies in those pictures are quite bright, by far a detracting feature in many cases from the foregrounds (which are usually famous buildings). None of them have people in them either, perhaps due to a combination of crowds getting in the way of the shot, the funny movement effects you get with a rotational camera and the time of day they're taken (usually very early morning... I mean at dawn).

 

Many times I've walked along this concourse and wondered at the majesty of this place. It is truly one of the most amazingly beautiful cityscapes of the world, especially at night, as the crowds stream towards the Opera House for a performance and the restaurants brim with contented diners, eating expensive meals and drinking in both wine and this breathtaking view. So, I've decided to photograph it properly, which means I'll have to come back in a few days and try my next theory.

 

The railing, by the way, is perfectly straight. The pseudo "rotational camera" process involved in stitching the panels gives it its apparent curve, as shown here.

 

To give some idea of the detail in this shot, I've attached a small cutout of the Bridge. It is reduced to about 20% of original size. Note the small gaggle of "Bridge Viewers" descending, about half way down the left-hand side of the arch, at the boundary of the light and dark sky.

 

 

Hi Tony - The lamp post doesn't really bother me that much, but it is unfortunate that the opera house is partially obscured by, umm, whatever that is that's partially obscuring it. Everything else is very nice! Adding people to the mix as you plan to do could make for a fantastic shot.

More excellent work from you. I have been incredibly busy with school the last week or two. I really need to get outside with my D100 and take some photos. Its a great tool.

Bob, I know what you mean by the "whateveritis" obscuring the Opera House (it was a lump of concrete). Actually, I thought of getting up on it but realised the lamp may have been in the bottom part of the picture, it was damn breezy anyway, and I might have been too far away from the restaurant in the left mid-ground.

 

Which brings me to visualization of panoramics. I have trouble with that. They almost never turn out the way I "see" them in my mind beforehand. This is such a breathtaking place to be (I never get tired of it, and I'm a local), to capture it and do justice to it is quite difficult when you actually start out to record the emotions of the place. Maybe I have to let the Force be with me or something. What I mean is that I didn't think the one I used was such a crash-hot position, but it turned out better than I'd hoped.

 

There's probably some dingy, dank, dirty corner somewhere in the vicinity from where a killer photograph can be taken. It's very time-consuming though, to find one, as you get one chance per day (with all the hassles I mentioned in an earlier post).

 

Ah yes, we must suffer for our art.

i like it man. im definitely not at the point to complain about a sky like this in my photos. i think its brilliant. but of course youve been doing this longer than me :)

Dare I suggest, I scrolled that troublesome lamp post right off the picture. I don't miss it at all in that view. We have a similiar place in our town but it will ages before I know how to shoot a pan like this. Must get started though! Thanks for the inspiration and information.

I like the lamp Margaret! It really was deliberately included.

 

This shot has been zooming around in my head for some time now, but I never had the gear to make it until recently. Visualizing pans is the hard part.

very beautiful. (btw, I think I see one person distinctly, anyway)

The left lamp gives the picture balance. I cant imagine it without the lamp; I think the framing thru the top of the lamp is the best given the situation and quality of the sky. I have a feeling that the sky is a bit oversaturated blue but that can be my hand-calibrated monitor.

This really is an impressive view. The colour, clarity and detail are crispier than a bag of 'Walkers'. The blues don't seem affected by the streetlights at all. Even on tungsten setting my results are nowhere near this clear (we have horrible sodium street lights over here). Regarding the people shot, naturally I look forward to it, but I have a feeling I will continue to enjoy this version for it's very solitude. I love that feeling in the city at night.

ps I can't imagine how large the full size file is!

Thank you for posting this first and voicing your "thought experiments" before you get your final. It's so cool to see your, Doug's, Marc's, etc's, considerations at this point of a difficult shot. The threads of this shot and your final will be broadening for so many.

Great image. Really like it. May I ask a question: You said that you chose differently expose the single images because of different ligthing situations. How did you work around getting different bright skies of the neigbouring images? Franz

I felt the lamp was needed to anchor the left-hand side of the shot. You may notice that I included the lamp on the right, although smaller, as a counterpoint. I also repositioned the tripod to make sure the group of lamps on the right were separated from each other, without interfering too much with the Opera House.

 

Pondering what a "real" photographer would do here, I came to the conclusion that he or she would organize some kind of scaffolding to rise above the street level distractions, would have an assistant and a producer, plus permission from the relevant authorities to keep a clearway around the camera. All this came to mind as I considered climbing the pedestal that someone above said obscured the Opera House. I saw myself all set up waiting to use my camera, as a friendly (but firm) copper came by and asked me to "move along, sir", or perhaps a harried Opera House employee informing me that their insurance did not cover crazy photographers in precarious positions. So I stayed on the ground and shuffled around a bit until I got what I thought was the best position, given the circumstances.

 

As to the separately exposed panel, I warped it using the same Panavue formula I used for the other 13 panels, cut out just the one stop darker Opera House roof and pasted it above the over-exposed one. It was a perfect fit, warped and all. There was just no way that the "photographic purity" of using the one exposure of the Opera House roof would work. My intention was to substitute this whole panel at stitching time, but, as Franz points out in his comment above, the sky was just too dark to accurately stitch (despite Panavue's "image blending" algorithm, applied as it calculates the stitch, which really does clean up a lot of exposure discrepancies).

 

The second shot of the roof was exactly the same, taken within seconds of the first, so there's no "time travel" in effect here. When I got back home and looked at the results I made the decision to kiss the sky (goodbye).

 

In reality, the final "processed" result has more verisimilitude than the over-exposed one would have had. That's justification enough for me.

 

If truth be known, the Opera House roof is quite dimly lit (I've thought this for years). An absolutely correct exposure would have been two or even two-and-a-half stops below the rest of the panels. There would have been a sort of dull blob where now there is a clear representation of the building. Despite this (I believe) potential flaw, I thought about (for three seconds) taking a third, darker shot, but the light was fading fast and I still had a few more panels to shoot, with their own tricky exposure decisions needing to be made.

 

I guess this raises the general subject of PS manipulation of an image to achieve an effect.

 

Taking a multi-panel panoramic like this with wildly varying light is a tricky prospect at best. The whole process took about four minutes, once I got started. The very fact that images are warped and stitched renders them, in the eyes of the curators of this site, a "manipulated image" (see the "Manipulation" guidelines for yourselves). Fair enough, too.

 

Take the "blue" light here. The use of the tungsten setting to achieve an impression of "night" is another (but time worn) manipulative technique. Cinematographers have used the "magic hour" - actually about the "magic ten minutes" before night falls, especially if you have an inconvenient sky - to simulate night-time since forever. I first read about it in a collection of essays on cinematography called "Masters Of Light" (University of California Press, 1984). Let me say this: night light isn't blue, it's grey ("gray" in the U.S.). It looks bluish to our eyes because the blue receptors in our retinas are the last to give up the ghost in fading light (the exact opposite of CCD cells, where blue is usually the "problem child" of the three primaries). Paradoxically, pre-sunset "grey" skies often have more blue in them than our eyes are prepared to accept (which is why we use warming filters for overcast skies). Our brains "Photoshop" the bluish colors to appear "normal".What our eyes see, what film sees, and what actually "is" are three separate things, and they vary at different times of day and under varying lighting conditions. Where does "reality" lie?

 

Well, it depends on your framework. The camera is capable of picking up every detail in a scene much more efficiently than our eye. We see the world through a perception cone of about one or two degrees at a time. We must swivel our eyes and move our heads around to take in a whole room, whereas a camera can capture the lot in one hit, and (if we view the print from a suitably long distance) our cone of perception can take in more of the scene in one glance as it is rendered in a photograph that we could if we were there in person. This shot is nearly 360 degrees. No human can see the world in this way. I tried to visualize the shot myself, before making it, and still got it wrong. But is this photograph "wrong"?

 

The same applies to the colors and the Opera House roof (discussed above). My aim here was to produce a finished image that, given the manifest unrealities of the panoramic perspective, allowed someone who had never been to this place I love to visualise what I thought about it. Alternatively, for those who had been here before, it might spark a deja vu reaction. The image is an impressionistic one, although steeped in hard reality, clear focus and digital technobabble. The "blue" of the night sky reinforces the "dusklike" quality of the actual scene, although the actual light was drabber. Again I ask, where does reality lie? Or (to be clever) is all "reality" simply a lie?

 

When taking "decisive moment" shots I apply much stricter rules about representing reality (if you don't count the fact that most of them are in black and white!). This is because the "mission statement" for this kind of photography is different to the current shot's. We can't hope to capture everything perfectly. Instead we pick pick our framework and stick to it. If we do our viewers will go along with the illusion.

 

Where all this "manipulation" argument comes unstuck is when the manipulation is denied, when the image is represented as something distinctly "other" than it really is, usually the better to justify misbegotten accolades for a work of "genius". Fraud is as old a crime as image manipulation as it is in photography.

 

By the way, Geraldine, the original image is about 3,000 by 17,000 pixels... roughly 153 mbytes in size. My working version is larger, about 22,000 pixels wide. At this size it would print to 8 feet wide by 2 feet high at 250 dpi.

 

I use a "working version" because sharpening artefacts and other "clean-up" work on the image at larger scale is softened and minimised when the image is reduced back to its original proportions. It's similar to why some photographers convert everything to 16-bit first (even if shot in 8 bit), do their digital darkroom work in that domain and the reduce back to 8-bit for printing. You get that little extra bit of subtlety in the final rendered result.

Discussing about lights ... I have one proposal... I feel the one in the middle of Opera roof is a bit disturbing. The panoramic presentation is really excellent and sky texture bring a real plus.

Jacques, your idea for the lamp-post extending outside of the frame is truly excellent. I like gimmicks like that, but never think of them myself. That's why I need a layout person watching over me at all times. Layout in these types of images often makes the photograph stand out. Thanks very much for the concept.

 

Do you mean the lamp in the middle of the Opera roof? If so, I had to leave it in as there was no other way to get the rest of the angles right. As it was, I positioned myself so that the lamps towards the Opera House were staggered apart from each other. What looks like a flat path leading towards the Opera House (along the water's edge) actually drops a few metres just after it starts here in the foreground of the picture. If I'd moved further along to get out of the way of the lights, I'd have been taking a photo of an embankment wall, with only the tip of the Opera House's "sails" (roof) clearly in view.

 

Cheers,

I meant this light Tony.

What Sydney public maintenance workers can't achieve, PS can do for you!

In fact it is quite minor disturbance I think. Glad you enjoy little trick and idea!

 

To Jacques "Chainsaw" Henry,

I suppose if I can "drop in" another entire Opera House roof (originally a project that took ten years, one hundred million 60s dollars, several large lakes' worth of concrete, twelve acres of tiles, three thousand tonnes of steel reinforcing rod, sacking of the original architect for being a precious little Scandanavian, the attendance - with tiara - of HRH Queen Elizabath II, Ludwig van Beethoven - posthumously, of course - and half the church choirs in Australia) then you're entitled to remove an offending light globe that ruins the view, I reckon.

But be warned, up close they're about four foot across, twelve foot up in the air and they look like they'd get hot. Bring a ladder and gardening gloves.

This would, of course, take us from the realm of mere Impressionism to the altogether different Surrealistic experience. For me, I've always liked a painting to look like a painting. And a photograph to look like a photograph. Can I put it any plainer than that? I like my meat and 3-veg for dinner, my women and my whiskey straight and a trusty Nikon in the shoulder bag (none of that pouffy Canon rubbish for me).

But if it'd help sell a pic....Mr. Dali, I'm your man!