Spring, Part Deux

This is a continuation of the first day of Spring. I had been waiting for a sunny weekend day to scout out a suitable spot to take a photo of Vancouver's skyline. Now I know that most of you have seen the skyline viewing south towards the central downtown area but that is the view most tourists remember as the tour buses transverse Stanley Park and stop at the Totem Poles where visitors most often take their vacation photos. Less obvious is the view looking northward from the south shore of False Creek which I prefer as you will see the Vancouver is surrounded by several mountains. It would appear that we located in the foothills of a vast mountain range. Vancouver is surrounded by water on 3 sides so most often your commute to the downtown area will involve a bridge, a ferry or an AquaBus .

Although it looked like a sunny spring day, the light was flat. Photographers know that the worst time to take a photo is at high noon due to the poor quality of light. Back in the days of film, this was when I would switch to Black & White. Here is the scene as would appear to your naked eye


(Jpg straight out of the camera, no additional processing)

Normal perspective approximates 45 mm as equated to 35mm . In the days before digital and crop sensors, cameras were originally supplied with 45mm standard lenses. Then for some reason they adopted 50mm as the standard, which is slightly telephoto. Now a photo taken with a 50mm lens takes an angle of view of approx 39°, while viewing with your eyes you will see nearly 180° (slightly less). . So a mere single image cannot convey the beauty of the scene before you as a photo is just a small slice of what I want you to experience. I want you to see the beauty of Vancouver from a perspective you have not have seen before. I want you to view the mountains behind. The West End of Vancouver was once the most densely populated area in North American, and it may still be and construction has not stopped. It has now expanded to the north shore of False Creek into the area which was once the showcase of the world, Expo 86.

Now Lori (Beemergirl) made a recent comment regarding PP: Post Processing of images



I am in the habit of posting more than a few photos and I cannot spare the time to individually edit or further process every photo that goes through my camera. I also do not shoot RAW in the normal course of gathering photos to post. Perhaps if I had a photo blog and only posted a single photo and a small paragraph with a few descriptive words I could change my procedures.

I grew up in the film age and used mainly Medium Format Cameras and delegated digital for snapshots. Eventually this changed and digital progressed to the point where digital was overtaking film. I first discovered this when I took my 120 film in for processing and my lab no longer provided optically produced prints. Rather they scanned your negatives and produced prints on their LightJet printer. Now I had to add in scanning charges. For prints up to a certain size you could get by with smaller scans, but for prints in my normal size of 16x20 I needed to pay for the larger scans. So I put my professional film cameras away and stopped producing large prints for a couple of years. Now digital has progressed to the point where it out resolves medium format film . Now I have played around with Photoshop 5 and 6 many years ago and it was just too confusing so I gave up. This is not to say that I haven't purchased dSLRs but I just haven't gotten into the RAW mode. When you shoot JPG your photos have already been processed by your camera; sharpness, white balance, blah, blah.

Last year I decided to purchase my 3rd dSLR for my big trip as I wanted something for lower light levels, and I have been devoting lots of my spare time into learning about ICC printer profiles and also some editing. I purchased a new wide carriage printer so I can print at home. For the past few months I have been reading tutorials and experimenting with editing photos.


(A sliver of a view looking north from the south shore of False Creek)

This was taken with a 55-250mm kit lens, unedited. As I mentioned before, the light was flat

Here is the same photo with slight processing to warm up the colour temperature, and perhaps minor curve adjustment


(Slightly processed, change in colour temperature)

Now, I still haven't shown you the skyline view that I wanted you to see. From my vantage point here is an image taken with my Sigma 10-20mm UWA: Ultra Wide Angle lens


(Sigma 10-20 mm UWA lens EF-s mount)

I suppose you could crop out the skyline and post the image in a panoramic ratio but you would not have enough pixels at 300 dpi to make a large print if you so desired. Right now this image doesn't look very impressive but at least you can imagine the view and see the mountains behind.

I decided to do a panorama using my 55-250mm telephoto lens, hand-held. This sequence was produced using 9 images. I metered for the scene then switched to manual mode so that all exposures were the same, which aids in colour balancing. There was a generous amount of overlap, perhaps as much as a third. Also the resultant stitched image was sharpened, curves applied, a slight warmth of colour temperature and contrast enhancement.


(Vancouver skyline looking north from False Creek)

My normal host for photos is Webshots but for some reason they limit the actual size that can be viewed even if you hit the Plus (+) key

so for the full image from Photobucket click here then click the "+" key