I've now owned this bag for a month and have waited this long to write the review in order to have put it through a few scenarios which have tested it a fair amount.  Before I purchased the bag, I was looking for reviews and although a couple were quite intensive when talking about the features, they didn't show the inside of the bag with a configuration that differed the standard images Lowepro sent out.  So that's what I wanted for this review; I will cover the basics of all the compartments (although you can find info on this anywhere), but more importantly, my personal configuration and how it works in the field.

​So here goes, but if you want a summary, then head to the bottom of the post and I should be able to sum it up in a couple of paragraphs!

I knew what gear I had and used on a regular basis before I bought the bag and so I was looking for certain specifications when researching what bag to buy.  As I couldn't find any pictures of the inside of this bag with gear other than the configuration Lowepro promoted it with I needed to work out the measurements of the gear I had a work out whether or not it would fit comfortably or be a bit of a squeeze.  Hopefully I can shed some light on this now...

With all my lenses in the bag, I can carry two flashes and two filters (although more will fit as you can see) with one space left over for odds and sods, such as cleaning stuff or a remote trigger.

To summarise this section, it easily holds a lot of equipment with some sacrifices with respect to the ease of access pouches (which I will explain in the next section).  I would say that the bag is best suited (and designed) for those photographers not using long telephoto lenses, but this doesn't mean its bad for those with telephotos.  If you have a fair amount of equipment that includes a 500mm F/4 or larger, you will want a large backpack, such as a 600AW.

                                                                                                           *******

                                 Pockets, Access Points and Handy Features
​
I've created a gallery of images showing the different compartments and small features that the bag possesses and makes life that little bit easier!

I'll start off by continuing with the camera section of the bag; the pockets on the back panel are just what you would expect from this range of bags.  Like most Lowepro bags now, the pockets are made of strong material with sturdy (feeling) zips and a feel that they won't be breaking any time soon.  I use one for cards, the other small one for a cleaning kit (brush and cloth) and the larger pocket for pens/notepad or any clean (small) clothes like t-shirts, socks, etc.  The back panel also holds a laptop compartment, as you would expect.  This has a good amount of padding and I'll have no problem trusting it with my laptop.

Next comes the part of this bag which for many will be the selling point and for some (including myself) has been made obsolete by owning a long lens, as well as making use of the optional add-ons (which I'll come to soon).  The bag has two side openings and one top opening for quick access to a camera with a lens attached.  After spending ages trying to configure the compartments for my own equipment and trying to make use of these 'extremely useful' side access points, I gave up and decided to put filters in that part.  One of the side pockets has been rendered useless by adding the water bottle holder to the side of the bag.  Once again, this is a great feature for those photographers that are using wide to medium length lenses (70-200mm at most - as you can see with Lowepros configuration images   >>   link here ).  I do like the added feature of having a hard top, it isn't that necessary I don't think (as you don't often drop the bag on its head or have things falling on the head of the bag), but it does give you that little bit more faith in the bag.  The top compartment has yet another pocket to store odds and ends in.

This brings me to the outside of the bag and probably the most interesting (unique) part of the bag as whole.  This is something that I expect a lot of bags will pick up in the future simply because it makes so much sense.  The 'SlipLock' technology is a series of straps surrounding the bag that allows you to move the accessories to wherever you want them to be.  When you buy the bag you are supplied with three accessories; tripod holder, water bottle holder and a small bag, I found myself not using the small bag as there are enough pockets around the bag for me.  The main reason that I wanted this was not for the purchasable accessories, but because I am going to Costa Rica for the summer and being able to attach para-chord, tarp, camo and more onto the outside of the bag (instead of taking up room inside) is going to be so useful!

Not a huge point but something that I thought I should mention, is that the bag has two small pockets on each side (I should say tiny, they just fit my phone in) and two small pockets on the waist belt too (only slightly more useful than the two side pockets).

Finally, comes the 'ActivZone system', which is not as cool as it sounds.  You can see it in the final picture, it is the padding on the back panel.  Basically, I have used bags with better cushioning and bags with better cushioning.  It does a good job and overall the bag feel great, better than most I have used, but this is more because of the shoulder straps than the back panel cushioning.  
​

The handling in harsh environments is the last point to mention.  I have used it in torrential rain without the all weather cover for about 10 minutes to see if water got in the zips and through to the equipment.  After 10 minutes the bag was perfectly fine, but with a lot of equipment on me I didn't want to push it any further and so I put on the all weather cover and obviously it worked perfectly.  No problems here at all!

For just under £200 I don't think I could have found a better bag for my personal needs.  As I am spending two months in the rainforest over the summer I will make great use of the outside 'SlipLock' strap system with shelter material like tarp and parachord, whilst the very good weather sealing without the cover will also be useful.  The first configuration that you can see at the top of the page is close to what my set-up will be out there, so there's just enough room for my equipment.  

​The only problems I have are the amount of padding on the back (there could be more, although its still very comfortable), that the access points aren't that usable with the equipment that I have and that there is no non-camera related, large pocket.  The type of pocket that you can put a jumper or your lunch in.  I guess that by including this you would lose the outside strap system, so I'm happy with that trade-off.

If you are a wildlife photographer with a lens larger than a 300mm F/2.8 I would say that this bag will not be the right fit for you, but if you are a photographer that uses a couple of bodies and a fair few lenses maxing out at 200mm then I'm sure this bag will be fantastic for you!  You will be able to make use out of the access points, great customisable inside compartments and weird amount of small pockets throughout the bag.

So there you go!  I hope you enjoyed the review and that it may help you make a decision if you had this bag in your basket and couldn't quite press purchase.

Thanks for reading!

Yesterday, when I got back from work I had this canvas waiting for me.  Lets call the facial expression a mix of excitement and wanting to collapse!

I had it printed from myPicture, they had a good deal on canvas enlargements and it made sense to test them out whilst it was cheap.  Overall the printing is very good quality!  

It handled he highlights better than I expected, in fact it was just how it displayed on my editing screen.  The shadowed areas are also very strong, I would say that they are slightly darker than I expected them to be, but under normal to bright lighting it look just right.

If you're interested in buying one of my images this large, head over the shop page and fill out the form.  I will decide whether or not the image you have selected will be good enough quality to print this large and then get back to you with sizes and prices!  I wouldn't want to send you anything that you wouldn't be happy with, because enlargements like this aren't too cheap.

Thanks for reading and if it's this image that you are interested in, the image code is: LND10 !

I'll start this post off with a phrase that seems be becoming tradition lately... sorry that I haven't posted for a while!

I was out today in Falmouth for about two hours with my new Nikon 200-500mm F/5.6 (< plus a few more acronyms).  There is a brackish (mix of salt and fresh water) pool called 'Swanpool', which provides very easy situations to photograph a few species of birds.  The body that I was using for all the images was a Nikon D7100, which has a 1.5x crop factor (due to the DX sensor) and therefore I was effectively using a 300-750mm F/5.6.

So not to bore you, I have provided a link (click here) to DP Review where you can read all of the technical information about the lens.  Now I can show you some real world tests exploring sharpness, focus speed, tracking and more...

                                                                                                      *******

This was my favourite image from the shoot and possibly the sharpest and yet it has been cropped a fair amount, about a 35%.  Although it has no specific purpose for being taken, I thought that I would start the review with a nice image!

​With the purpose of this shoot being for a review, the edit for each image is only with highlight/shadow, contrast and exposure changes, no sharpening has been done.

                                                                                                      *******

Bokeh
The aesthetic quality of the out of focus areas of an image can also be called 'bokeh'.  For me, this aspect of the optics is make or break when I'm thinking about purchasing a new lens.  The Nikon does really well, I'm not going to say that it is the best out there, but it is unobtrusive and clean.  The next image was taken for the purpose of displaying the bokeh.
​

Wanting to accentuate the out of focus area, I used F/5.6 on this line of gulls.  Firstly, I'd like to point out how sharp the image is at the widest aperture and longest focal length.  But focussing on the bokeh and you can see that within about 2 meters of the subject the out of focus gulls look quite nice.  The edges are soft and although with a wider aperture you would gain a nicer effect, the quality for this aperture is very good.  You may notice that it doesn't look as nice on the legs of the furthest gull (at the very top of the frame).  In a way that is a little bit distracting once you notice it, but what you can take away that is positive, is the 'rounded' look of bokeh at this distance.  This is due to the amount of blades that the aperture is made of, the more blades and the fact that this lenses' blades are made to be circular, means that the 'bokeh circle' is smoother.

                                                                                                      *******

Focus Speed and Tracking
Again the lens did very well in the test and delivered most images with acceptable focus.  I was putting it through a bit of a harsh test because (like the first image of the Tufted Duck) the subjects were constantly moving on the water.  However, on still subjects the focus was always correct.  The speed was good, over the past year and a bit I have got used to using 500/600mm F/4 lenses which has superb focussing and so it may be slightly slower to grab the subject (the difference is extremely minimal), but once it was locked on to the subject it didn't fault and tracked really well.  As a harder test of the tracking I spent a little time photographing the gulls in flight.  

I turned off the VR for these images as it's a bit unnecessary and battery consuming.  Although this could have been a time to test the 'sport VR' mode, but not having a full grasp on the VR modes I chose not to try it out at this time (it will come in further reviews).

I thought that you would appreciate a change in focal length, because after all, this is a zoom lens.  As I expected when buying this I will use this at 500mm 95% of the time.  In fact I found myself moving backwards to fit a bird in the frame, when I suddenly realised that I could just zoom out, but I guess this is habit and will change after a few weeks of use.

Anyway, this next image was to try out the tracking and optical quality at the wider end of the focal range.

You would probably expect it to be a little, if not quite a lot sharper than 500mm, but from my tests it seems that the change is extremely minimal, if there is any at all.  I am not a pixel peeper and prefer 'real world' opinions and images rather than graphs and charts.  Therefore you may read reviews which show quite drastic differences between focal lengths or apertures (or at least make it seem drastic), but in reality it is superb all round.  Which brings me on to the next point...

                                                                                                      *******

Aperture and Sharpness
As I said earlier, I haven't noticed massive differences between apertures and I came to that through tests around my house and changing between F/5.6 and F/8.  So today, I though I'd see if there was a difference between F/5.6 and F/11.

The following images are of a boat which was quite a way off shore and I'll also show you 100% crops so that you can compare yourself and draw a conclusion.  However in my opinion, I can't see enough of a difference to actually bother shooting at a smaller aperture, in fact it just makes me more confident in being able to shoot at F/5.6 whenever possible!

                                                                                                      *******
​

Chromatic Aberration
One of the problems that all lenses face is chromatic aberration (also known as colour fringing).  It's fairly complicated, but put simply it occurs on high contrast edges.  I didn't actually have chromatic aberration in mind when thinking about what to write about today, but I though I'd find the worst case of it from the shoot and show you.

​Thanks for any likes and shares and feel free to comment below!

I never go to any location without an image in mind or at least some research in my back pocket.  This is for all types of photography and you can take it from the simplest form (browsing Flickr) to the more extreme (an accumulation of everything I'm going to talk about).

Photo Sharing Communities
I rarely go on a shoot that hasn't been planned a week, if not months, in advance.  The first point of call for me is a mixture of Flickr and 500px.  Typically with the areas that I go to, I wouldn't expect there to be many (if any) on 500px and so I go to Flickr and do a quick search for the location.  Recently, I went on a trip to Dorset and knew that I wanted a sunset shot at Durdle Door.  This being a landmark of Dorset and a hugely popular location for landscape photographers, I knew that there would be some inspiration on 500px.  Seaching for 'Durdle Door' and then changing the search criteria to 'pulse' to see the highest rated images and I suddenly have a huge range of inspirational images (a quick screenshot shown below). 

They each have their benefits, I find that if I am looking for photographic inspiration then I need 500px, but for knowing the area before you arrive and knowing what else is there, then Flickr provides better information.

Knowing the location before you arrive will also allow you to improvise and find a new spot if the one you are imagining can't be made.  This has happened to me before on quite a few occasions, one that springs to mind was when photographing for my last project (you can find that project here --> link) in Bissoe Nature Reserve.  I arrived and wanted an image of the old chimney that was part of the arsenic refinery, because it gave me a good subject to talk about.  Yet, when I arrived I couldn't make the image look nice, however much I tried.  So I moved on to another location that I had seen looked good at sunrise.  The idea was to have a strong reflection of the sky colours in the pond, whilst still showing the 'industrial' past and present state of the nature reserve, which came in the form of the metal structure in the back of the image.  So, although the image I had planned didn't work I still followed the other steps in this blog to get one of my favourite photographs.

The use of a long exposure means that were the water was meeting the there was this cloudy/streaky effect, which helped to emphasise the leading lines.  The problem I was having was that the sky was grey and this was reflecting on the stream.  To get around this I bought out my circular polariser for the first time in a while (although I have found myself using it more and more).  By applying about half of the full polarisation you can see the orange start to appear in the bottom of the stream, because a polariser cuts out the reflection (or quite a lot of it at least).  Here is a comparison between polarised (left) and normal (right):

Changing subjects to the wildlife subjects now, Bissoe gave me a great opportunity at the end of summer to improve my dragonfly and damselfly photography.  For the first time, I managed to capture a Dragonfly in flight!  It isn't an amazing image, but I'll still post it as it was quite an achievement for me (click on it to see it larger).

To start explaining the settings for this image above of a Golden Ringed Dragonfly, you need to understand what I wanted to capture.  I love environmental shots of wildlife, these are images that show the habitat or at least give some clarity as to the scenery that the subject was photographed in.  Some amazing examples of this can be found on Ben Hall's website (www.benhallphoto.com).  Therefore to show some of the background I would want to use a slightly smaller aperture than usual, after some experiment exposures, I settled at F/8.  Then, as I was hand-holding, I needed a suitable shutter speed.  I got 1/160th of a second by using ISO-320.  I didn't mind increasing the ISO as I was on a full frame camera (D800e) and so there wasn't going to be any compromise of image quality.  

The final image to talk about is of a subject type that I have probably spent the least amount of time with - flowers.  There are a couple more images from Bissoe that I could be talking about, however I chose to do this one as, firstly I really like the image, and secondly because the subject isn't going to run away and the light was pretty constant on this day, I had loads of time to use a few techniques which would make the picture as sharp as possible.  So firstly, I came to have these have settings as I needed a depth-of-field that would include most of the flowers (F/8), a low ISO to remove noise and a shutter speed that would take most of the slight movement from the breeze out.  I now had to ensure that there was as little movement as possible in camera.  To do this I used live view, because this means that the mirror is already up when you take the picture and so you don't have the shake from that movement.  I also used a remote shutter release to avoid my own movement shaking the camera.  In the end I had an image which was the sharpest I could get it and in good lighting, giving me the best chance of a strong image after post-production!

I hope that this blog has given you some useful tips that you can use in your own work, thanks for reading and if you missed the first part of this two part blog then follow this link (Part One) and have a read.

Thanks for any likes, shares and comments!

I am currently in the process of creating a magazine article based on the Bissoe Valley, as part of my university course.  The purpose of the article is to focus on the nature within the area and instructing readers on how, where and when to take the images.  I am writing in this way as this is the form of text I am planning on using in my final third year project - instructional and informative book on the travelling and photographing the landscapes and nature of the UK.

I thought that I would make this post to show you the species that I have captured in only a couple of mornings and some information on the settings and techniques used to form each image.
​
The first image to talk about is the sunrise landscape above.  The photograph was taken on a Nikon D810 with a 14-24mm F/2.8 but at 18mm.  I made a conscious effort on this morning to not shoot at the widest angle that I had available.  As I often find that on arrival at a location I will go straight to the widest angle and make the composition work, however there was some dead plant material in the foreground that wasn't adding anything to the image and so I zoomed in a little - only 4mm can make a big difference.  I chose to give the sky one third and the foreground had the remaining two.  I could have easily given the majority of the composition to the sky, as it was such a nice sunrise; however I knew that I was writing the article on the plant and animal species of Bissoe and so I need the heather and pond to be the main focus.  As I said in the caption of the image, the final photograph is 5 exposures - two pictures either side of the 'correct' exposure that increase/decrease by 1-stop each time.  The blending is all manually completed; working with the +1 exposure for the base layer (background), the +2 exposure for the middle ground and foreground materal and finally the -2 exposure for the sky.

This Beautiful Yellow Underwing Caterpillar image is a stack of two photographs as I couldn't get the depth of field that I wanted whilst keeping the background soft. Taken just after I shot the sunrise image, these caterpillars were littering the heather, this species eats common heather and I believe that as night came they froze and were yet to 'defrost' (for lack of a better word) in the morning sun.  Both of the images are the same settings (shown in the image caption) and I just changed the focus; the first image is focussed on the head and the second image is focused on the water droplets on the front of the body.  Photoshop has excellent stacking software in-built however I did this manually with a paintbrush and my graphics tablet.  Using the 'difference' blending mode to get the closest alignment - they needed lining up because, although I shot them only a second apart and with the same settings, the wind moved the subject a little.  I tried shooting this with a smaller aperture (i.e. F/32) but you then introduce the background as an element instead of the colourful gradient that it is in the image you can see here.

The image below is the last image that I'll be talking about in this segment of the blog.  This is the same butterfly caterpillar as the photograph above, yet was photographed on a different trip to Bissoe.  This day was sunny with some clouds and a little bit more windy.  You may notice that the settings are different and possibly reflect these conditions.  There are no 'complicated' aspects to this image, no stacking or blending (for a change)!  But as the day was a little windy I needed to get around this by using a couple of techniques.  Firstly I could see that the caterpillar was not straight and so I wouldn't get the whole subject in focus.  This led me to compose the image with the back end of the caterpillar falling out of focus and to rotate the camera in order to get the heather on a diagonal slope.  When rotated to normal the caterpillar was facing the bottom left of the frame and I didn't like it as much.  Next I needed to get the settings right, first off was the aperture - F/11 gave a nice fall off of focus on the tail end of the caterpillar and had quite a lot of the heather in focus.  To account for the smaller aperture I had to raise the ISO to 320 and therefore obtained a shutter speed of 1/160th.  Still not quick enough to freeze the movement that the wind was causing.  I borrowed some wire from another photographer in order to stabilise the heather by rooting it to the ground.

So there we go, even with the images that are not complicated in their post-processing there is a lot of thought that goes into the on-site production of any image.  

Does it bother you that the caterpillar was actually facing down and that you cant see any movement blur even though it was a slightly windy day?  Well then I guess I've got another idea to blog about soon!

​Thanks for any likes, shares and comments!  

After shooting a time-lapse of the sun rising over St. Ives a couple of days ago, I realised that I had an opportunity to experiment with a new blending mode.  This blending mode is called 'lighten' and as you may expect from the name, it takes the lightest parts of one image and overlays it onto the other.  I'll take you through how I made the image you can see above.

The two images that I chose to use were; one as the sun rose (to get the most colour in the sky) and one whilst the sun had not risen (meaning that all of the street and house lights were on).  Usually when editing two images to be blended together I concentrate one image on the sky and the other on the foreground.  However this time, the second image was only being used for the lights and so for that one I pushed the highlights to +100 and bought the shadows up a little.  The image taken at sunrise was edited as though it was just the one exposure that was going to be the final image.  The two starting images can be seen below:

The next stage is to layer the two files.  I did this by selecting the whole canvas (ctrl-A) of the darker image (bottom right) and copying then pasting it onto the other file.  You will now have a second layer on the first image, click on this layer in the layer panel and then change the blending mode to 'lighten' (shown below):

Photoshop will now take all the parts of 'layer 1' that are lighter than the background layer and place them on top.  When I did this with these files, other parts other than the lights shone through (as you can see below) and so I had to do some clearing up. 

Thanks for any likes, shares and comments!

I once had the comment "oh, so you know how to use Photoshop", when another photographer was shown an image of mine.  This was a few years ago and I immediately thought that this wasn't what I wanted people to think.  In my mind a viewer should look at an image and be blown away by the scene, not question the reality.  This being said, in the current world of photography, so many images have elements changed and removed that anyone with editing know-how may question all the images that they see.  I recently watched a landscape image critique by FStoppers (follow this link --> YouTube), in which they will often make a comment along the lines of - "is this one real?".

So the point and the question that I'll be looking at in this post (and would love to hear your own opinions in the comment section) is - how much is too much and where would you personally draw the line in editing?

                                                                                                      *******

Removing Objects and Distorting the Scene
My personal views, when it comes to landscape photography, is that you should make an image as beautiful as you can without changing the physical/constant landscape.  This obviously involves some grey area but I'll clarify what exactly I mean by this.  

A few examples of what I would remove/distort:

• Shooting panoramas you will often find more things going wrong in terms of matter that you didn't want to include but had to due to the extremely wide field-of-view.  For example when photographing at Ralph's cupboard recently, I was with two other photographers, who were standing on the same cliff edge as me.  This meant that in the final stitch, I had a camera bag on the floor to the left, a photographer on the right and my own tripod leg in the very central foreground.  All of these, I removed in post.  However, there were some cows, which due to the long exposure were blurred and I felt (even though they were very small in the frame) that they ruined the image, however I couldn't remove these as they were part of the constant landscape.  
• Accidentally leaving a flash in the foreground of a panorama I shot at Kynance Cove, was a rookie mistake and due to me rushing, I didn't notice until post.  However I was willing to remove this.
• The previous post I made on my blog was about stitching and blending my vertical panorama of Bassett's Cove.  In this I posted a video of the blend and you will quite easily notice that I had to distort the scene to match the two exposures.  Some may say that I have changed the scene and it wouldn't be identical to the real-life scene.  However I would say that this is perfectly acceptable; I haven't changed the scene i.e. made the cliff taller, introduced a new sky or something along those lines.  
• Finally, it can be hard to avoid flare in sunset/sunrise shoots and so you may need to copy and blend another piece of land over the top of the part with the flare.  For the purpose of removing flare, I would say that it is fine; if you were purely doing it because you didn't like how a flower was dying and would prefer to have a living one in the foreground, then I would say that this is too far.  

As you can probably tell from those few examples, if your final image comes out representing the natural landscape and how it presented itself on that day, then you can call it a landscape photograph.  However, if you didn't like the sky, but shot a really nice one the day before and so you combined the two images, I believe you now have to call it - and make it obvious that it is - a composite image and ensure that someone viewing it doesn't mistake it for a real scene.  

I mentioned the 'constant' landscape in the introduction to this section and what I mean by that term is, you can remove objects such as a flash which you forgot you left in the foreground, or a tripod leg which got in the way because of shooting such a wide-angle.  But you shouldn't remove anything which you haven't introduced to the scene.  An example of this - in my image of Bassett's Cove, there is a rusty, white fridge in the gulley down the right hand side of the image.  I wouldn't remove this as then I have changed how it would look to someone would see it through there own eyes if they were there (even though I doubt anyone would be that eagle eyed, or even care enough to spot the fridge and realise that it wasn't in my image!).


Colour and HDR
For photographers; colour, lighting, time of day etc, are often the most important factor for their images.  I would say by all means enhance colour until it looks like your screen is broken, I mean my images are probably brighter than most would make theirs.  Bright foregrounds and colourful skies are something I love, but they can be over done and I often find myself sliding the opacity of layers back a bit before saving the final image.  

When talking about oversaturating, I can't help but bring up HDR photography and how its purpose is to capture a greater dynamic range (it's in the name, High Dynamic Range), which will help obtain accurate highlights, shadows and midtones - not make your image look like the most detailed and colourful scene possible.  This is the reason I choose to create HDR images by blending with brushes and gradients and picking the parts I want to compliment the scene; instead of stacking the exposures and playing with the sliders.  A lot, if not the vast majority of photographers use the latter technique and produce images far better than my own, but I find that I can't use that technique to my own benefit and have become accustomed to my own style of edit, which I can only recreate using the way described before.

I draw the line of 'too far' at changing colours.  If you have a blue plant on green grass but would rather have a purple one and so you grab the colour picker and slide the hue from blue to purple, then I would say you have changed the scene too much to call it a true landscape.


Blending Different Moments of Time
An argument that those against a 'heavy edit' would say, is that copying a sky from a different shoot is just as bad as waiting for the sun to go down, photographing the sky and then stitching the two in post.  Personally I believe that this is fine.  On many occasions I photograph the foreground whilst the sun is still visible and then the sky gets much more colourful about 5 minutes after.  I have no problem with blending 'moments of time' in this way.  The justification for this comes in the form of how I remember the scene whilst I was shooting.  When we look back at memories, we tend to exaggerate what we liked and remove the bad aspects.  I wouldn't remember the foreground looking really warm and the sky looking okay - I would remember the sky at it's best moment and the same for the foreground.  So I guess, my landscape photography can be classed as more artistic than documentary.

                                                                                                      *******

Wildlife
Changing subject matter from landscapes to wildlife and my views change slightly.  I would still never add anything to an image without having to then call it a composite, but I am more lenient toward removing unwanted matter.  I actually can't find an example on my website but I know for a fact that I have done it; imagine a very plain scene - green background, single stick as a perch and a robin-sized bird sat atop - but there is about an inch of stick coming in from the right (where the bird happens to be looking) and cropping it out would throw the balance of the image, well then I would remove the stick.  I don't make a habit of removing objects unless they are really distracting, because as I said before there are no example of this currently on my website.

                                                                                                      *******

Where else does it matter?
I have just talked about landscape and wildlife as they are what I know about and spend all my time photographing, however they are not the only forms of photography that I would apply these 'rules' to. Anything documentary based; news publishing and sports pop to mind - I would apply the 'rules' to.  More 'arty' photography (for lack of a better term), for example, portraits and advertising, I would say is far, if not infinitely different, in that you can distort reality to whatever crazy thought comes into your head.

                                                                                                      *******

What's Next
That's the end of this post, I could have gone into more detail but hopefully you now understand my viewpoint (which I would say is a lot more lenient toward a heavy edit than most photographers would be). This topic hasn't come completely out of the blue; I have an assignment to do over the next few months, of which I have complete control over.  My current train of thought is looking at the change in landscape photography in the past 100 years or so.  The series would include technological change, different eras of art and different styles of photographers at the time and would involve me replicating these styles in a portfolio.  At the moment, this is just one idea of a few and so I'll be checking how feasible it is and whether or not the results will be worth the time spent completing.  But I'll have another post to make soon and so I'll try and talk again about what's coming up!

Back in June I shot a vertical panorama of Bassett's Cove (Portreath, Cornwall).  The edit was a little tricky and so I've decided to make a post on how I completed the final picture.

                                                                                                      *******

First off, you must make sure that when you are shooting a panorama, you use manual exposure settings and in the first stages of editing (which I will cover soon), the edit on each picture in the same.  If you don't follow these 'rules', it can be very hard, if not impossible to stitch the final image together.

                                                                                                      *******


First Edit of Raw Files

When creating a panorama you are going to be working with quite a lot of files and so, you will want to stay organised.  I personally use Photoshop and Camera RAW for post processing, and to stay organised I give each photograph a star rating.  I was working with two sets of images and so I gave one set (seen below) as 5-star, these were the sky exposures.  I then also gave the other set of images a 3-star rating, these were the foreground exposures.

After organising, you will be starting the primary edit.  I tend to edit the sky images first, I have taken a screenshot of the settings which I have used for this particular shoot.  You can by all means use this as a basis, but make the different sliders work for your own images.  In case you don't know what they do, I will go through them and explain why they are at those amounts. 

To start, you want to just pick one image from the panorama, this means you should find one image that covers most of the aspects of your final shot.  As you can see from the screenshot above-left, the image I chose to edit first included the sky (clouds and sun) and the foreground).  

You may notice that I have circled one of the tabs, this is 'lens correction' and is vital to any image.  It will remove chromatic aberration, lens distortion (important with landscapes and wide-angle shots) and vignetting.  

- The temperature for this image is set to 'cloudy' because, although technically the true white balance of the scene would be somewhere between that and 'daylight', I wanted to accentuate the sunset colours by warming the image.

- Exposure is purely a choice of yours and how bright you want your image to be, at this stage in the edit, I use the exposure slider to balance out the histogram and make sure I have detail over the whole dynamic range which I can then exploit in a later edit of the full panorama.

- To directly affect one part of the histogram (i.e. dark and light parts of the image) use the highlights and shadows sliders.  Usually in a landscape shoot, the sky will be brighter than the foreground and you may not have the right filter to even out the exposure, this is when the highlight slider is useful.  In this shot I have it at -100 to make the area of the sun smaller.  It is hard to explain, but if you try this out with your own images will  you know what I mean.  I have set the shadows to +100, simply to make the blending later easier, this will again become apparent later.

- Next is the whites and blacks sliders, I don't like to play with contrast sliders until right at the end of my edit, but I will use these two sliders to get the best 'looking' histogram before proceeding to the next stage.  Sliding the whites up will stretch the right side of the histogram toward the right edge and you want to stop just before the histogram touches the side, and vice-versa for the blacks.  This basically means that your whites are white and your blacks are black, which is an important part of the edit if you have played with the highlights and shadow sliders (which will flatten your image).  

After you have played with these edits and have the image looking how you would like, you need to sync the other image in the panorama to the exact same edit.  To do this, you need to hold CTRL and select the other images that you have marked as the same star rating (this is why you rated them earlier).  Then click the 'synchronize' button (circled in the image to the left).

Now you want to apply the same techniques to the second set of images.  After this is complete you will have a set of images exposed and edited for the sky and another set of images exposed and edited for the foreground.

                                                                                                      *******
Stitching

Now it is time to stitch, and I although there are a few different ways to get to the final point this is a breakdown of how I do it. 

Open the first set of images (sky or foreground) and go to    File >> Automate >> Photomerge

Click the 'Add Open Files' button.  The settings that you can see in the following screenshot, is how yours should be set up.  The vignetting and distortion control have already been done in Camera RAW, inside the lens correction tab.  Then click okay and wait for a couple of minutes for the stitch.

For the sake of keeping this blog at a bearable length, I have a link to a video which taught me how to deal with wide angle distortion control (click here --> YouTube)

Repeat the process once more and you should have two panoramic images, like shown below:

At this point you may be able to see the final image coming together, and whilst not wanting to put you off, you've just completed the easy part and now comes the blending...

                                                                                                     *******
Blending

This part of the edit is very long and so I thought that I would create a timelapse of the edit from this point onwards.  I could have easily written twice as much as I already have on the next section alone - because of this I will be making a future blog about blending specifically!  

Thanks to anybody who read this (and any other of my blogs), I hope that they are helping in some ways.  I am not great at Photoshop, but am learning more and more - so I'll be updating my blog along with the shoots I do to practice new Photoshop techniques.

Feel free to comment with anything that could help both myself and any other readers.
Thank you!

I recently posted this image on my social media page (click here) and said that I would write a blog post about hyperfocal distances, well here's the post.

Not usually thought of as a technique that comes into mind when photographing wildlife I will show you how it affects any image.  Mostly however people think of hyperfocal distances being important for landscape images. Although I am writing a post about how important this is, I would also say that you should never sacrifice the settings which will get you the image you have created in your mind in order to get the whole photograph in focus, because there are always other techniques that you can use - focus stacking would be the next point of call to achieve full focus.

As we learn photographic practices, depth-of-field plays a huge part of most people's artistic intent, but the technical aspect of controlling depth-of-field tends to not make it past the basic - smaller hole, larger area in focus and vice-versa.  A lot of people will have got by never needing to know any more, but what if you had a landscape that you loved and so you posted it on Facebook, then  someone asked you to print it, however when they received the print the background matter was out of focus (which didn't come across at the low resolution of an image compressed by Facebook)...

Well to make sure that this doesn't happen (or at least minimise the problem), carry on reading this blog and remember the simple steps that will give you images that are sharp from front of back.

                                                                                                      *******
The most important thing you need to do is use manual focus!  I can't help but notice anymore that when you are out at a photography hotspot and there are lots of people taking landscapes, you can still hear the whirring of autofocus.  All those people are allowing their camera to do something for them.  If you have an idea of a photograph in your head, your camera can't read your mind and so it is extremely unlikely that it can produce the same results as you could in full manual.

I started learning about hyperfocal distances through a tool given away free in an amateur photographer magazine.  This was basically an interactive tool on which you would input your settings and it would tell you where to set your focus.  Shown below is a table of a few hyperfocal distances (taken from digitalcameraworld.com).

(If you don't know whether you have a crop or full frame sensor inside your camera a quick Google search of your model will tell you).

After a while of referring to these graphs, tables and tools, you will get the idea and when you arrive at a scene, you'll be able to tell where to focus depending on the distance from your camera to your subject, your aperture and your focal length.  As most people don't change their equipment very often, you get used to how your personal setup works in different situations quite quickly.  If I take my Tokina 11-16mm out for a shoot I know exactly how to set the focus, but if I were to use a mid range zoom, it would take a minute to think about and calculate the hyperfocal distance needed.

                                                                                                      *******

I also want to show you a couple of examples of how the depth-of-field plays a large part in all images - landscape or otherwise.

So obviously, for this image (Reykjavik, Iceland) I wasn't aiming for the whole image to be in focus, but the aperture I used was the biggest decision when taking the photograph.  I wanted the background to have enough detail for the viewer to be able to see that the swan is in front of a house, without the detail being too distracting. 

 At first I assumed that F/4 would make the background softer than I wanted, therefore I started with F/8 and worked my way down until it looked how I wanted - which just so happened to be F/4!  

The other example (below) is of a situation in which I didn't just pick a really small aperture (i.e. F/16 - 22) and focus one third into the image to get it all in focus.  Instead, the furthest you can see in the picture is only about 100m because of all the tree cover; therefore I could use a slightly larger aperture (F/11), keep the shutter speed the same and lower the ISO.  

So, what was the point of the changes, why not use F/16? 
Well, there was some wind on this day and so the leaves were moving a little bit.  Not enough to be an artistic effect, instead, just enough to make the leaves look out of focus and blurry.  Therefore, my ISO was up slightly and this (however minutely) was adding noise to the image.  When you increase your aperture you will make the image brighter (presuming you are shooting in Manual) and so you have to either change your ISO or shutter speed. In the case of this image, I didn't need to change the shutter speed (I already had it set to remove the movement blur of the leaves) and so I was left with changing the ISO and lowering the noise - which is never a bad thing!

If you've carried on reading down to this point, I hope you enjoyed the post and found it helpful in some way.  Thanks for reading and feel free to share on social media and/or comment below if you have any questions or wish to point out something I haven't talked about and you think other people may find useful.

Thanks again!