timeimmortal

I apologize that the pictures are getting a little disjointed; usually there is something akin to a narrative flow to the series in the Pics of the Day, but in this case things are jumping around a bit. I’ve been having trouble finding time to edit all the pictures I took in Vancouver, and this is doubly true of panoramic images, which is the reason that things are a bit out of order.

I’m very happy with this picture; I just didn’t get around to finishing it until after I’d posted a picture taken from the ferry that Grace and I caught the following day.

Anyhow, this is Coal Harbour, which is located just off of downtown Vancouver, a bit west of Stanley Park. It’s a pretty nice area, actually, and it’s easy to see why it and other parts of Vancouver get used in a variety of different television shows and movies.

As has become fairly standard for the panoramic images I compose, I took each of the six shots that comprise this image and matched the exposure levels in each, in addition to applying my usual calibration/Punch preset to each. I re-thought the Clarity setting that is a part of the Punch preset though, and set it back to 0 (from 50), because I intended to mess with the Clarity of the finished panoramic.

I also applied noise reduction and chromatic aberration correction to each image, before exporting the lot of them as TIFF files. I then loaded the images into Hugin and defined…quite a lot of control points between each image and its neighbour (on the order of 15 per image pair, which is high for me). Hugin took about ten minutes to render the finished image, which I loaded back into Lightroom for further adjustment. Specifically, I set the Clarity to -100, giving the image that “diffusion print” look again which, in the harbour setting, really worked out well (it gave a slightly misty quality to the boats and the rest of the background).

That image is what the good Reader sees here now.

On Easter Sunday, Grace’s grandfather and dad took us, along with two of Grace’s sisters, out for a drive/tour around Vancouver. We stopped, at one point, by a dock a little to the east of Stanley Park, not too far from Vancouver’s downtown area.

There was a fair bit of subject matter to shoot, including this row of cargo containers, which were literally right next to where we parked. I took the shot kind of haphazardly, holding the camera out over a half-height fence and chancing an unaimed photo; with a bit of cropping, it turned out really well.

Edit-wise, I played around with this photo for a while before deciding on how I wanted to present it, which turned out to be in its original form. I made two other versions of the picture, one in which only the red/orange shades are still coloured, and one in which only the blue shades remain. But while saturation adjustments were fun, I decided to post the original photo as the Pic of the Day.

It was a fairly cloudy day, and I found it a bit surprising that I had to shift the ISO to 200 in order to get good outdoor shots; usually, lightly-coloured clouds improve the lighting in a scene (or at least that has been my experience) because they diffuse the light. Not so today. Still, ISO 200 is pretty tame, and I only did a bit of noise reduction on this picture. I also boosted the orange, blue, and red saturations a little bit, to bring out the containers a bit more.

Animals can be fun subjects for pictures.

This is Penny, Grace’s grandparents’ pet dog. That’s really all I have to say about her — I’m not really a dog person, and so while I enjoy taking pictures of them, I don’t dwell on their merits as much as I do with Cats.

Despite the overexposed sections, I had to shoot this picture at a high ISO, because while there was a fair bit of light coming in to the house, the angles at which it was coming in were not conducive to proper exposure. C’est la vie, I suppose.

Edit-wise, apart from the noise reduction required, I didn’t do all that much to this shot; I applied as much sharpening as I thought I could get away with, in addition to the normal calibration/Punch preset that I always use, and I have to say that I’m pleased at how much detail Lightroom was able to eke out of the scene; in particular, Penny’s fur retains a lot of fine detail.