Bukit Nanas Heritage Mansions - a panoramic perspective.

This row of heritage style mansions in Bukit Nanas, Kuala Lumpur have been slowly crumbling and decaying over the last many years and will no doubt at some point disappear for good. I wanted to capture this historic architecture and try to create a panoramic image to fully image the fine details of these classic buildings. To do this I used a 17mm tilt-shift lens and captured a total of 106 individual images (16 framed shots each with 7 bracketed images to fully capture the dynamic range of the scene). The images were post-processed in Apple Aperture then tone-mapped in PhotoMatixPro plugin. 

The final images were then converted to black and white and selective colour brushed in using Aperture to highlight some specific parts of the image. 

The individual resulting 16 images were then stitched using AutoPanoPro. The stitching result is not ideal given the geometry of the buildings and the location of my camera setup but it certainly gives you a real sense of the geometry and design of the structure. 

The final panorama was imported into FotoMagico to create the short slideshow sequence as shown in this video.

Camera: Canon 5D MkIII

Lens: Canon EF17mm f/4.0 TS-E

ISO: 100

Focal Length: 17mm

Aperture: f/8

No of Brackets: 7 (-3 to +3)

The Blue Mansion

Having had a few days break from the blog over Xmas and New Year it's time to start the occasional post again as we make our way into 2012. I visited Penang over the festive period and had the opportunity to stay at the wonderfully historic Blue Mansion .... or Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion which has been beautifully and meticulously restored to its former glory. This venue provided some great photo opportunities and the above shot exemplifies that with the deep indigo blue colored walls, the rustic floor tiles and the stunningly detailed and colored spiral staircase.

I also had the opportunity during this trip to test out a new lens which I have added to my arsenal of Canon L lenses. I have often wondered about the benefits of a tilt-shift lens and given the high cost of these particular lenses plus the fact that I may not use it enough to justify the cost I have put off this purchase. However I eventually relented (as I often do with camera equipment) and picked up the shiny new Canon TS-E 17mm f/4.0L just prior to the Xmas break.

I love my existing wide angle 16-35mm f/2.8 L lens but one small aggravating feature it has, particularly when taking architecture, are the sloping perspectives which give the impression of the tall buildings falling backwards. At times this can be used to good advantage but in many circumstances it's good to be able to keep everything orthogonal.

I will share some comparison shots of this new tilt-shift lens in a later post but this shot here shows the power of such a lens. Placing the camera body on a tripod and leveling this it's a simple job then to shift the lens up or down to frame the shot and retain perfect verticals. The other great advantage here is the ability to take three shots, one with no lens shift, the other two shots with positive and negative lens shift to capture the scene upwards and downwards. Then it's a very simple task to stitch the three frames into a portrait panorama and as there is no lens distortion makes the stitching process simple and flawless compared to when I have previously done this with a standard wide angle lens. In a similar fashion with the tilt-shift lens adjusted by 90 degrees you can easily capture a landscape panorama with three shots.

I think the shot shown here convinces me of the great benefits of a tilt-shift lens and I am sure that this will probably become one of my favorite lenses to use especially for architectural shots or panoramas.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Xmas

Bangsar Shopping Centre in Kuala Lumpur, one of my favorite haunts, has made a great job this year of their Xmas decorations as you can see. Shot with my i-phone using the 360 app which stitches a number of individual images together to create a large panorama.

Pacific Place Panorama

The i-phone is now a very powerful mobile device for photography. .... yes it's i-Phone Friday again! Alongside the camera there are now many many apps that can assist you to edit and post-process the picture. This photograph was taken using an app called 360 which obviously allows you to take panoramas and stitch these in phone .... something that would have taken a very powerful computer and an expensive software application to execute a few years ago.

This image (or group of individual images) was taken at Pacific Place Shopping Centre in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Central Park from Top of the Rock

For the best views of the New York City skyline and Central Park head to the Top of the Rock observation deck at Rockefeller Centre on 50th street, between 5th and 6th Avenues. From the top 3 floors there are wonderful viewing galleries with glass walls which gives you a commanding view of the city from all directions. Looking to the south it's also the best place from where to get probably the bets view of the Empire State Building and see it in context with the rest of the city buildings

Top of the Rock

Probably the best view you can get of New York is from the top of the Rockefeller Centre building or "Top of the Rock". From here and looking to the south you can get a wonderful view of the Empire State Building and the whole of Manhattan Island which really gives you a great perspective of the city. If you look from the north side of the building you will see a great view of Central Park - look out for a post on this view later.

Tehran Panorama

This was a panorama created from 8 individual images looking north over the mountains that surround Tehran in Iran.

Panoramic Photography

Panoramic photography has always been one of my interests and usually there are numerous opportunities to use this technique to highlight a dramatic view or landscape which normally cannot be captured within the limitations of a one frame shot. During a recent visit to Paris I took an early evening walk by the famous Louvre Museum which was beautifully lit up illuminating the wonderful contrast of the famous glass pyramid with the backdrop of the older architecture of the museum buildings; an ideal candidate for a panorama.

I shot 8 individual frames covering the extent of the buildings using an approximate 25% overlap between frames using an ISO of 800.

After running through my basic workflow in Aperture I exported the 8 frames as full resolution jpeg files and then imported these into Kekus Digital's Calico 1.4rev2 application where the frames where interpolated, blended and then merged into a horizontal panorama as shown below.

Here is another typical landscape which can be an ideal opportunity to create a dramatic panorama. These 5 shots were taken at Suances on the northern Atlantic coast of Spain all taken at ISO100.

Again after post-processing through Aperture the 5 frames were exported as jpegs, imported into Kekus Digital's Calico 1.4rev2 application where the frames where interpolated, blended and then merged into a horizontal panorama.

Calico software is an automatic multi-row photo stitcher application. Calico was developed with ease of use in mind and unlike many other stitching programs, does not limit you to a single row of images or a 3x3 mosaic. With Calico, you can shoot several rows of images or a single row.