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Recognition
Equipment
| Camera | Fujifilm FinePix A900 |
| Exposure Mode | auto |
| Focal Length | 8.8mm |
| Aperture | f/2.9 |
| Exposure | 1/5 sec. |
| ISO Speed | 200 |
| Flash | off |
Lets start with the taking and processing of the photo. When I travel with work I try and make sure that I only need to take hand luggage. This simplifies my life a lot but does mean that I don't have the space to pack my main camera (the Sony DSC-F828 is big and heavy and would take up about a third of my hand luggage). So for travelling I have a small point-and-shoot camera, a Fujifilm FinePix A900 that I bought a couple of years ago when I visited Bled for the first time. It's perfect for travelling but does rather lack much in the way of options and settings. For example, it has an option to set the ISO level where the only setting you can choose is auto! It does have a scene selection mode though which does a reasonable job of choosing appropriate exposure settings.
So for this photo of Lyon I set the scene mode to Night which apparently gives "clear shots of night scenery and illumination". I didn't have a tripod with me (I'd managed to forget to pack my gorillapod) and so tried to hold the camera as still as possible on the top of a wall. I couldn't get the whole scene in a single shot so took the following three photos.
I then used Microsoft's free Image Composite Editor (ICE) to stitch the photos into a panorama. When I chose the photo for this weeks post I actually went back and did some work on the source images before stitching them together. You'll notice that the right hand image is spoilt somewhat by the large crane. I used the brilliant object removal tool in Paint Shop Pro to replace it with sky before stitching the improved panorama in this post. I really quite like this photo and it shows that even with a cheep digital camera and little control over the settings it is still possible to take good pictures. It turns out that someone else liked this photo as well.
Towards the end of November I got a rather odd e-mail asking me if I had actually taken this photo. At first I was worried that someone was trying to take credit for my photo but in fact they were looking for permission to use it. SIMPACK, a German company that develops software for simulating multi-body systems, is holding a training course in Lyon in March and their marketing people had been looking for photos to use in the brochure -- my photo appears on the second page. Note that they removed the unsightly crane by simply cropping the right hand side of the image.
This is the first time anyone has asked permission to use one of my photos, but if my technique improves maybe it won't be the last!
3 comments:
Congratulations on that.
By the way many thanks for alerting me to the bracketing facility of the Sony. I'd never noticed it. Now I've found it I shall start having fun.
I still haven't got around to the Eagleton header photos yet. But then there's plenty of time before I'm back in the UK..... Well, there was. But it's fast disappearing.
I love it when people ask perm ission - which I'm ALWAYS happy to grant. What annoys me is when I put in something in Google and find my photo on someone's site without them asking. Then I tell them to remove it - it's called being bloody-minded.
Agreed. I doubt I'd ever say no if anyone asked to use a photo but if I ever see one being used without permission then I will be telling them to remove it.
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