Golden Gate Bridge

Check out a larger version of this image here.

Thanks to some inspiration from Trey Ratcliff after interviewing him for the This Week in Photography podcast, and reading his book A World in HDR, I decided to see what all the fuss is about and give this technique a try for myself.

I grabbed my Nikon D700, a 14-24mm lens, and a tripod, and drove up to San Francisco to see what I could capture. The obvious place to shoot from was the Golden Gate Bridge, I wasn’t trying to create “art” per say, but rather to gather some pixels with which to try out this technique… so the GG was just as good of a spot as any.

I set the camera to auto-bracket five f-stops (+2 and -2) — I realize that I could’ve gotten similar (or the same) results with just three exposures, but then this was all an experiment, and I had a blank 16GB CF card in the camera after all… so what was a few more megabytes? Oh yea, I was shooting in the raw file format. [Read more...]

Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS3: Stitching a Panorama

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 beta is out in the wild, and some of the more powerful features in this application lie within the tight integration with its 300-pound older sibling, Photoshop CS3.

And the brilliance of this integration lie within the fact that Lightroom is able to leverage the power of Photoshop CS3 to do some of the more complex and niche “heavy-lifting” imaging tasks, while still providing seamless access to the powerful organizational features in Lightroom 2.

To demonstrate this, on my way back to San Jose from Sausalito, CA today I pulled over to snap a few photos of the Golden Gate Bridge. I only had my G9 “point-n-shoot” with me, and the lens wasn’t wide enough to capture the scene like I wanted … so I captured it in several chunks.

This tutorial demonstrates how to use Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS3 to merge those chunks into one seamless image. Check out a higher resolution of the image here.

UPDATE: You’ll need to be running Photoshop 10.0.1 (or later) for the Lightroom 2 integration to work.

Golden Gate Bridge Panorama