Photography tutorials, links and interesting bits August 2012

We do try to get these out before the weekend but last weekend the sun came calling before Saturday so you can delve into these at work rather than on the beach or in your garden. Much better use of your time at work I think. here again from Toad Hollow Photography via Lightstalking

A wonderful week in the field of photography has passed once again, and Toad Hollow Photography has been searching high and low for the best links to tutorials, great photography and interesting links to share with everyone.  These inspirational and beautiful pieces are some of the best seen this week, and the Toad really hopes you enjoy viewing them as much as he did in bringing them to you.

It’s time to go, the time is right by broo_am, on Flickr

At 3:45 am on a quiet Sunday morning the alarm clock went off and the Toad sprung to action.  An extensive blue hour shoot was scheduled with an exotic supercar, and he couldn’t be late!  The resulting collection of photographs is featured in his blog post “Blue Jet: Corvette Grand Sport“.

Here is just a taste of what is on offer from Toad

TUTORIALS

Bird Photography Tips | How to Photograph Birds Like a Pro – a great set of tips and techniques is discussed for photographing wildlife in general, and specifically birds.  This is a thoughtful post that contains really useful information for the avid bird photographer.

How to Process 32bit HDR images in Lightroom 4.1 – A.D. Wheeler creates a brief video tutorial that shows the visitor how to work back and forth between Photomatix and Lightroom to achieve the best quality image possible from the workflow.

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GREAT PHOTOGRAPHY

The King’s Gate at Kastellet – this is a jaw-droppingly good photograph of a remarkable location in Copenhagen, Denmark.  Jim Nix photographs this historic site and by exploiting a perfect composition, Jim captures a great image complete with natural leading lines in the architecture and surrounding details that are brought together with a great vanishing point.

Steady Hand – an absolutely epic scene is captured by Jerry Denham, full of mystery and shadowplay.  As a fisherman makes his way through a fog enshrouded setting along the Little Tennessee River, Jerry takes the opportunity to create a great visual story through his art.

Canyon’s Edge – a gorgeous landscape taken in the Grand Canyon is displayed here in this post by Jason Hines.  Great natural light paints the scene with a deep backdrop of the canyon that appears to go on forever.  This image contains many layers, each revealing their own secrets.

Click Here: More Photography Links That Are Made of Win

Gigapixel the Gigapan revolution, photography Jim but not as you know it

A gigapixel is an image 100 times larger than that produced by an average 10 megapixel camera. Sounds astonishing, a file so huge that you can zoom into an image of a crowds as large as say the US Presidential inauguration and see every face.

These two pictures are from the same image just zoomed in!

This is a really fascinating prospect, that allows examination of a picture at perfect resolution. Perhaps it is city scapes that float your boat in which case a canvas so huge that you can see the whole vista and then zoom into to see single rooms

OK so now you are interested.

These astonishing images are created using a bit of kit from Gigapan, these are holders that take your camera and move it in a precise manner to enable you to capture any number of images and then stitches them together to make one image. You define your top left point and your bottom right point of what you want included and let it do it’s stuff. It moves and presses the shutter release, overlapping each frame enough to allow it to stick them together seamlessly. It really is remarkable. The images are so huge that to appreciate them you need to view them on screen so that you can zoom in and pan around. A print, however  huge would just not do it justice.

The website for Gigapan is very informative with lots of advice and tutorials, so an good place to start investigating. The gigapan contraption can take a wide range of camera types from compacts to dslrs. The gigapan site has a gallery that shows work already done by enterprising photographers, here is a link to the most popular

You really do have to go and have a play with these images, this site is a series of images from Vancouver and here you can wander around the Grand Canyon looking at individual rocks and bushes

This really is so much fun, do go and have a look

Now there is a new development that takes the whole thing to another level. Gigalinc is an “immersive photography” project by University of Lincoln student Samuel Cox that allows people to explore gigapixel photographs on a giant display using arm movements and hand gestures.Using an Xbox Kinect sensor for motion detection and a large cinema display, the resulting user interface is strikingly similar to the interface Tom Cruise uses in Minority Report. You can watch the video on how this works here