Wedding Photographers Cardiff – ALS Photography
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We had a great few days touring the Picos De Europa Mountains in Asturias, Northern Spain. We drove up the mountain from the small town of Cangas De Onis with its Roman bridge built in 437 and rebuilt 300 years later. Continue reading
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Here are some images from the Basque region of Northern Spain. We stayed in a great campsite overlooking the beautiful bay and town of Zarautz, just west of San Sebastian. We hit lucky the first night we arrived as there was a festival in San Sebastian, a great atmosphere all around the city. Continue reading
After taking bicycles from Hoi An to Cua Dai Beach (literally means big sea mouth), we decide it would be a great place to spend a night on the way back to Da Nang. Cua Dai Beach is a 2 mile stretch of palm fringed fine white sand and gently rolling breakers with the Cham Islands lying just offshore. Running parallel, about half a mile back from the beach is a gently winding estuary, a hangout for the local fishermen. It’s a great place for photography, with sunsets on the estuary and sunrise at the beach! It was still dark when I got down the beach pre sunrise and I was amazed to find so many people already there doing there morning exercise and Tai Chi! The locals were so friendly, many coming up for a chat, particularly interested whether I liked their country. I met an old man with a toothless grin who told me (by mime) that he shot down Americans during the war! It was great to watch the local fisherman negotiating the surf with their early morning catch on their Coracles, slightly different to their Carmarthen cousins, they are made using interwoven bamboo and waterproofed using resin and coconut oil!
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The best time to experience Vietnamese life was to get up early and have a stroll around the local markets. There is a real buzz in the hustle and bustle of the narrow streets and pavement vendors. These local markets are a daily occurrence and the fresh produce gets recycled regularly. When walking around you feel like you’re in a time warp, amongst century old traditions, such an amazing place to people watch. After a few days of exploring you get to recognise some of the characters, especially some of the ladies who ferry people on the river – a hard life, but it appears to be a happy one!
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My Son, situated about an hours drive inland fro Hoi An was the ancient capitol of the Champa Dynasty. It is a large complex of religious brick built ancient ruins dedicated to the Hindu God Shiva. Unfortunately most of the temples were obliterated by US carpet bombing during the Vietnam War, many of the bomb craters are still visible today. We made the mistake of booking a day tour where all the buses and their respective guides arrive at the same time. Our guide was hilarious, like a Vietnamese drill sergeant – we made the immediate decision to loose him and wonder round ourselves! Top tip if you’re going to visit My Son, organise a driver and come in the afternoon when all the buses are long gone!!
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About 30 to 40 minutes South of Da Nang is the beautiful town of Hoi An, a Unesco World Heritage Site. Once known as Faifa, Hoi An was the commercial capitol of the Cham kingdom which controlled the Spice trade with Indonesia between the 7th and 10th centuries. The Old Town is a maze of lanes and alleyways, full of Chinese shophouses mainly serving the tourist trade. There is a lovely atmosphere at night just as the sun goes down and the thousands of Chinese lanterns light up. Some people may hate the amount of tourists this beautiful town attracts, the upside of this is an abundance of great hotels and restaurants – oh and propper coffee!!!!!! In reality many busloads head back to nearby Da Nang and the beaches in the evening so it is still easy to get lost in it’s charm. We love it!! it’s our favourite town in Asia so far! We also find our favourite hotel in Vietnam, the Thanh Binh Riverside, we initially book in for 3 nights and end up spending 8!
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These are a few panoramic images from our recent trip to Victoria, Australia and here are some tips of the method I use of taking and stitching multiple images to make a panorama.
1. It’s important to get the top of your tripod mount level so that when you pan the tripod head the horizon stays level. This saves you having to loose parts of the image later when cropping to a level horizon. You do this by adjusting the height of each tripod leg independently. Some tripods have a small spirit bubble aid at the top of the tripod legs. I also use a spirit bubble that attaches to the camera flash mount so I can double check the level as I pan the camera. I can then make any further minor leg adjustments if required.
2. It’s most important to use the camera in manual exposure mode. If the camera is using any of the auto exposure modes, each frame is likely to be lighter or darker than it’s adjacent frame, this then becomes much harder at the stitching stage. If you are including the sun in your final panorama image, take the initial exposure from the frame nearest to the one that includes the sun for a more balanced overall exposure.
3. Choose a manual white balance setting so that the white balance remains constant throughout the scene.
4. It’s also important to put the lens/camera in manual focus mode and focus manually. You do not want the focus points changing between frames.
5. When taking the images, start at one edge of the intended panorama, take the first shot, pan the camera making sure you have at least one third overlap of frame, take the second shot, then repeat until you get to the other end of your intended panorama image. I always start at the left edge of the panorama, I just find this easier when stitching. Also, bear in mind that you may often loose some information from the top, bottom and edges of your panorama at the cropping stage after stitching.
6. I always use a shutter release when the camera is tripod mounted. This helps speed up the panning and taking process and stops any vibrations when shooting long exposures. I also try not to touch the lens when panning just in case I inadvertently touch the focus ring.
7. Composition is equally important in panoramic photography as any other type of photography, so know the main rules of composition and also experiment by breaking them. Sometimes points of interest at the edges of the frame often work to help lead the eye into the image and keep it there.
8. Switch your camera to live mode to aid composition and manual focus.
9. Be careful with very wide angle lenses as perspective can often look odd when stitched into a panoramic picture.
10. Watch out for movement within your panorama, such as people, transport, flora blowing in the wind and waves breaking on a beach. These can sometimes cause overlapping sections that don’t line up at the stitching process and ruin the final image.
11. Experiment using your camera in both the vertical and horizontal position while creating your panorama.
12. For very precise panoramas you can buy a panoramic head for your tripod. This head enables you to move the mounted camera back, forth, left and right so that the Nodal Point of the lens is directly over the axis of rotation of the tripod, this will eliminate parallax error. Each lens has a different nodal point and can be quite tricky to find. For anyone interested here is a link to a youtube video that demonstrates the setup.
Use the same guidelines as with the tripod method. Manual Exposure, white balance and focus. Try and keep any horizon level and allow room for some cropping after stitching.
I won’t go into this in great detail as it will depend on what software you use to stitch the panorama together. I usually use Adobe Photoshop ‘merge to panorama’ which I can also access directly from the RAW files in Adobe Lightroom. Here is a link on Adobe TV on how this works on Adobe Photoshop Elements.
If you haven’t got Photoshop or Photoshop Elements another excellent free programme that I can thoroughly recommend is called Hug-in.
Level the tripod head
Level the Camera
Use manual exposure, white balance and focus
Take the series of shots from the left edge of your panorama
Allow a little room for cropping
Check Composition
Check for movement within image
Stitch the Panorama
Experiment and print
We met up with Christian, a friend from our Tao Philippines trip and had a great day trip discovering parts of Bohol. We started at a statue commemorating a 16th century blood compact between the Spanish and Bohols. Nearby is the Church of Immaculate Conception in Baclayon. Completed in 1727 and made of coral stone it is considered one of the Philippines oldest churches. We had a short stop at a butterfly farm before heading off to see the islands infamous Tarsier. The tiny cute Tarsier is one of the worlds smallest primates. They are nocturnal hunters feeding mostly on insects and apparently can jump between 3 and 5 metres! We then travelled through forest, paddy fields and small villages to the Chocolate Hills, Bohol’s best known tourist attraction. They are very uniform grass covered hills between 30 and 50 metres in height, geologists think they are a weathered Marine Limestone that sit on top of impermeable clay. I prefer the legend that they came into existence when two giants threw stones and sand at each other in a fight that lasted for days. When they were finally exhausted they made friends, left the island and left behind the hills! We decided not to wait at the main viewpoint for sunset as the direction of light wasn’t great so we headed off-road into the surrounding Paddy fields. A very friendly local farmer guided us to a perfect spot to watch the sun go down, he even went off and got us some fresh coconuts for us to sip! In the meantime Sacha had met all the local children and sent them out to make sure we weren’t lost, it was such a shame it was too dark by then to take any pictures. Running alongside our taxi they gave us a great Philippine sendoff!!!
We flew from Puerto Princesa in Palawan to Cebu City, the second city of the Philippines. We had an overnight stop here before getting a 2 hour ferry trip to Tagbilaran on the island of Bohol. From here it was about a 40 minute transfer to Alona Beach on Panglao Island. We had a great week staying at the Alona Northland Resort, highly recommended if anyone is going that way. Alona Beach is another big diving centre of the Philippines. We had a great daytrip to the nearby Balicasag Island, watching the sunrise and spotting some dolphins as we travelled out on the boat. Balicasag had some of the best snorkeling we had seen in the Philippines, so many fish, it was like being inside a tropical fish tank! We also stopped off at Virgin Island, a beautiful sandbar – shame about the hawkers selling shells, corals and urchins! We had some great sunsets on Panglao, the best when we got a local tricycle driver to take us to the end of the island. There is no way we would have found the spot if we went ourselves so it just goes to show you can’t beat local knowledge.
We joined 24 other intrepid explorers on a 5 day voyage through the totally unspoilt archipelago between Coron Town and El Nido organised by the amazing Tao Philippines. The group consisted of nationalities from Wales, England, France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, USA, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, Canada & the Philippines. We were split into two outrigger style boats with A-Mazing crew on each headed by Johan and Jimboy. We all had our main bags stowed on the boat and had daily access to a day bag which housed your essential items, including a change of swimwear and a toothbrush – what else do you need??? It was so refreshing not having access to any outside communication for 5 days, something we take for granted in our modern lifestyle. This trip was not about first class travel and luxury accommodation, it was about sleeping on pristine beaches, adventure, deserted Islands, amazing snorkeling and swimming, drinking Rum and making new friends – not necessarily in that order! We ate lots of bananas, rice and fresh fish which was expertly prepared by the onboard chefs. The crews of both ships were superb, such good fun! They did soooo much for us, nothing seemed a chore, always smiling – a huge Thank You goes to them!