C&c

frel

Hi I am new in the block and really looking forward to improve my photo skills. So here's my first shot with both HDR and panoramic (unluckily free hand for both as they did not want me to use my tripod on the top of the Rockfeller center).

Any advice/comment will be helpful for me to do it better and/or avoid the mistakes mad this time


Now you can shoot

schmoo

Hi Frel and welcome to Dgrin!

What a great view! And you were obviously there at the right time too, just at sunset. Very, very awesome and I bet it was even better in real life.

The thing I notice the most here is that the shot looks just a bit out of focus. I'm not sure if it's because you weren't allowed to have the tripod, or if it's some artifact of the HDR, but I do feel as though the buildings should be crisper.

I hope get you a change to go there again! And that we'll see more shots from you here

frel

schmoo wrote:

Hi Frel and welcome to Dgrin!

What a great view! And you were obviously there at the right time too, just at sunset. Very, very awesome and I bet it was even better in real life.

The thing I notice the most here is that the shot looks just a bit out of focus. I'm not sure if it's because you weren't allowed to have the tripod, or if it's some artifact of the HDR, but I do feel as though the buildings should be crisper.

I hope get you a change to go there again! And that we'll see more shots from you here

Thanks for the feedback. Looking back at the originals, some pictures are indeed fuzzy on the empire state (I checked the ones in detail about the part where the sun is but the ones further to the right weren't that good actually). This looks more like a slight shivering than a focus mistake (I had set manually the focus for all these shots as my 40D decided that it won't focus on these and other shots looks fine)

Unluckily for me I live on the west coast and will have to wait for my next trip to New York to do it again (if anybody know a similar place where I can use my tripod without having 3 guys jumping on me I'll be more than happy to try it).

But I'll try to post more as I really want to progress and my friend's feedback is too positive to be helpful

jeffmeyers

schmoo wrote:

Hi Frel and welcome to Dgrin!

What a great view! And you were obviously there at the right time too, just at sunset. Very, very awesome and I bet it was even better in real life.

The thing I notice the most here is that the shot looks just a bit out of focus. I'm not sure if it's because you weren't allowed to have the tripod, or if it's some artifact of the HDR, but I do feel as though the buildings should be crisper.

. Perhaps you have a crisper, in-focus single RAW file that you can use to do an HDR image. You might get better results.

frel

jeffmeyers wrote:

. Perhaps you have a crisper, in-focus single RAW file that you can use to do an HDR image. You might get better results.

I'll give it a try but then I'd loose the panoramic view I think which is too bad as I liked the large view of the cityscape But well I'll work on the crisps pictures and if anything good come from that I'll post it there.

jeffmeyers

frel wrote:

I'll give it a try but then I'd loose the panoramic view I think which is too bad as I liked the large view of the cityscape But well I'll work on the crisps pictures and if anything good come from that I'll post it there.

Oh, I see. I didn't read what you wrote earlier carefully. I thought maybe this was a pano made from a cropped wide angle shot. Bummer.

frel

jeffmeyers wrote:

Oh, I see. I didn't read what you wrote earlier carefully. I thought maybe this was a pano made from a cropped wide angle shot. Bummer.

It was 2x3 shots in 21mm (or ~33mm if I include the crop factor of my camera) using an automatic bracketing of ~1.5EV. Made with a terrible hangover from New Years Eve (it was January 1st) and a temperature that was low enough (below 20F I think) for me to not be able to stabilize my camera for more than one 80th of a second apparently

The lesson I got from that is that planning to go at a nice spot for this kind of photo for January 1st is a bad idea