Weekly Photo – October 8

I had a couple of emails from people wanting to see what I captured with my dSLR before I made the Daily Snap of Oct. 1. Below is the big view of Observation Peak from the ‘fuzzy pond’ at Bow Summit in Banff National Park. I used my Canon Eos-1ds Mark III and my Canon 17mm TS-e lens to make this image. I shifted the lens down to see the foreground log and then shifted the lens up to take in the peak so this big stitch is probably the equivalent of a 12mm lens on a full frame camera. I also used tilt to give me great DOF from foreground to background in this photo.

©Darwin Wiggett

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The Weekly Photo – September 24

©Darwin Wiggett

I took this photo last year on a hike up onto the Columbia Icefields (with a certified guide of course!). I used my 24mm TSE lens to make a square image (shift the lens up and down like I did in this post – see the video). I highly recommend the hike up the glacier; if you want to experience a great hike contact IceWalks.

Weekly Photo – July 30

©Darwin Wiggett - Canon EOS-1ds Mark III, 24mm Tilt-Shift Lens

I used my standard ‘prairie’ filtering technique (a Singh-Ray Cokin Z-pro sprocket mount LB warming polarizer plus a 4×6 Singh-Ray Two-Stop hard-Edge Grad in a Cokin Z-Pro Holder) to even out the exposure between the sky and the foreground in this scene. I also used the shift feature on my Canon 24mm TSE lens to make a big square image (click on the photo to see a larger version). If you are interested in exactly how I made this photo, check out the video below. The only thing the video does not show is my post-processing procedure which is simply using Photo Merge in Photoshop CS-5 to merge the two component images. Finally I used a strong s-curve on the photo to punch up the contrast in the scene. As you will see the video is ‘on the fly’ (or mosquito in this case) and anything can happen.

The Weekly Photo – June 11

©Darwin Wiggett - Canon EOS-1ds, 17mm TS-E lens

I love wide angle lenses but often even my widest lens (17mm on full frame) isn’t wide enough! At the Spring Rockies Photo Tour we had this amazing sky one morning and from horizon to high above our heads the clouds were full of lines.and texture. I wanted to capture all that sky plus a foreground. This is where my Canon 17mm Tilt-Shift lens came to the rescue. If you look at the set of images below you can see that I took four horizontal images to make this one ultra wide vertical photo. First, I took the third image in the series below. Here I had the camera back level to the horizon so the trees did not distort. Then I took the fourth image by shifting the lens down to see the foreground. Then I took the second image with the lens shifted up to see the sky. Finally I swung the camera and lens up and shot the first image to get the clouds directly above me. For each shot I took three exposures and then blended them as an HDR using Exposure Fusion in Photomatix. I used Photoshop CS5‘s “Photo Merge” to stitch the 4 HDR images together into one big vertical image (final file size is 18 by 30 inches at 300 ppi). In the end I have a big file that can be printed huge and that has correct perspective but that takes in nearly 180 degree angle of view.

©Darwin Wiggett - component parts