timeimmortal

As in ridiculously stunning. And yes, I know that the linked video was shot by a professional…but it is also being touted as having received no processing save for the scene-joining edits. No noise reduction, no colour correction…nothing but the raw footage.

If so, then Canon, with the EOS 5D Mark II, has done something incredible. The video has excellent dynamic range, great contrast and (most important of all) fairly minimal digital noise. Considering that much of it was done at night, that’s incredible. The video’s composer, Vincent Laforet, even goes so far as to say that the 5D Mark II outperforms, in low light, the video recording capabilities of the Canon XH A1 camcorder, their top-of-the-line video recording unit (also, be sure to check out the “making of” video at that last link).

As the lolcats say:

I had a chance to speak with a news photographer recently, who gave me a bit of clarity on the reasoning behind Canon’s incorporation of HD video into the 5D Mark II. Apparently, rather than being a nod to the consumer side of the market, it’s a nod to professionals, especially news photographers. I wasn’t aware of this, but it does make sense: apparently, there is a real shift away from still photography taking place in the media right now, so much so that it just makes sense to blend the two functions — traditional still Photography and high-powered video recording — into one unit.

This is a sunrise I captured from the parking lot at work. I tried out a few new Lightroom presets on it, placing the focus of the edits on enhancing the sky. That’s always tricky, because it seems to be the case that in the Canon EOS 350D, digital noise is most prominent in the blue colour channel.

This is a HDR image created from a single RAW exposure, which means that there’s a bit more digital noise in the shot than I might otherwise accept. But the image itself is pretty good, and the clouds in it look spectacular, especially in terms of colour and contrast.

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Time for another panoramic. I’m not sure, but it seems to me that I took quite a lot of panoramic images in Vancouver — while I don’t think I took as many as I did while in England, I wonder if the overall frequency, relative to the duration of the trip, was higher?

Anyhow, the picture:

This is a small harbour along Westwater Drive near Richmond, British Columbia. It’s on the road that more or less connects the area near Finn Slough with Steveston, a harbour community south of Richmond, and apparently the home to more than a few interesting shops.

Anyhow, Grace’s parents stopped the van so that both Grace’s sister and I could take some pictures of the harbour (it is a good view, even if it is a bit cloudy), and for whatever reason I decided to take yet another panoramic image set.

Edit-wise, I matched exposures between the images (as usual) and did some basic editing to clean up chromatic aberration, digital noise, and other issues. I then exported each image as a TIFF file, and loaded the whole lot of them into Hugin.

Experience with other harbour panoramics has taught me that a lot of control points are necessary for images of this nature, so I went a little bit crazy in defining said points, but I think it worked out for the best. Hugin did its job well, and I have only found one notable misalignment in the image so far. And it’s a big image (nearly 11,000 pixels wide).

Once the panoramic had been rendered, I loaded it back into Lightroom and did a few additional edits, including saturation adjustments and some additional exposure tweaking. I also set the Clarity to -100, which gave the image a slightly diffuse, not-quite-misty feel that I like.