Matt BlazeAdams-Morgan, 2am, Washington, DC, 2023
Stupidly many pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/52991590112
Flickr
This is a photo of the street, but not a street photo, since it doesn't depict the *life* of the street, merely the physical plant of the street. It looks like it could be a bustling place, yet it's empty.
I wanted a very high resolution capture to accentuate the sense of unbalance. No matter how close you look, no one is there.
This was made by stitching together two captures made with the 32mm/4.0 Rodenstock Digaron-W, yielding a 230MP final image.
Dr. Eric J. Fielding, PhD@mattblaze Interesting photo. You must have done work on adjusting the brightness levels to get such an even exposure everywhere.
@EricFielding I always spend a lot of time on contrast, but the biggest issue with stitched photos like this is light fall off at the edges. You can fix that in post, but I got better results by using a center filter made for the lens.
BruceThat explains the apparent greater distortion on the left side vs. the flat wall on the right. I like it though.
Buried somewhere, I have a two row pano of the Santa Cruz Wharf: a gazillion pixels. It's fun to zoom over and over and still have a sharp image. It's a late morning in early September, so there were many people. (Only one tiny fast walker appears twice.)
@bruce_korb @EricFielding Distortion in wide angle lenses comes in two flavors: distortion caused by defects in the lens design, and distortion caused by the wide angle of view.
Lens defects (such as barrel and pincushion distortion) alter the geometry of the projected image. That can be (easily enough) corrected in post if you have a profile of how the lens is distorting.
But there's also distortion caused by the inherent properties of a wide field of view. This is harder/more interesting.
@bruce_korb @EricFielding
... here, subjects parallel to the camera (such a wall) will be undistorted (absent lens distortion). But objects at an angle on the side will appear elongated in one dimension and compressed in the other. This is true of any photo, but a wide angle amplifies and exaggerates the effect.
This photo would be the 35mm full frame equivalent of a roughly 13mm lens -very, very wide. It's optically well corrected, but the angle of view is so wide that it still looks wrong.
@bruce_korb @EricFielding There's also a complementary effect with ultra *long* lenses, which create the illusion of compressing objects perpendicular to the camera.
A lens I like to use. It has some interesting bokeh effects, too:
Jeffrey Goldberg@mattblaze @bruce_korb @EricFielding,
Back when I carried a camera (even a point and shoot), this one one of my primary uses of telephoto / optical zoom. For my sort of “tourist snapshots” taking pictures of a person, I would use this to make the what is behind the subject appear closer to the subject.
BTW this probably represents the peak of my sophistication with photography, but I still like reading what you all have to say.
Indeed. When you piece together a panorama, that perspective distortion is plainly obvious when you look at the way the pano software stretches the different images to piece them together. (I use PS to do panos in two steps: 1) align the photos, then, 2) separately, blend them. I get to see PS's stretching.