A very happy new year...

A very happy new year to all ZLR enthusiasts!

David

"David J Taylor"
wrote in
.uk...
A very happy new year to all ZLR enthusiasts!

David
Same to you all,
/per

David J Taylor wrote:

A very happy new year to all ZLR enthusiasts!

David



Same here David.

Here's an interesting greeting link...


http://190slgroup.com/club/video/new-year_cd.htm

JT

Hi David,

Happy New Year to you, too. I bought me and my wife his/her Panasonic
FZ30's, and we're both very pleased with our cameras! My first set of
pictures were taken at National Cathedral in Washington, DC, on Saturday.
You can see the pics at:

http://www.scottspeck.com/pictures/n...ral/index.html

For the interior shots, I used the "night scenery" setting to force the
ISO=80 setting, and my longest exposure times were seven seconds. I used a
lightweight (2 pound) tripod to keep the camera still. The shots on my web
page are compressed by roughly a factor of three in both dimensions.

Thanks for all your great camera advice. At some point, I want to take some
photography classes to learn better technique. In the meantime, though,
I'll be taking lots of new pictures.

Regards,
Scott


"David J Taylor"
wrote in
message .uk...
A very happy new year to all ZLR enthusiasts!

David

Scott Speck wrote:
Hi David,

Happy New Year to you, too. I bought me and my wife his/her Panasonic
FZ30's, and we're both very pleased with our cameras! My first set of
pictures were taken at National Cathedral in Washington, DC, on
Saturday. You can see the pics at:

http://www.scottspeck.com/pictures/n...ral/index.html

For the interior shots, I used the "night scenery" setting to force
the ISO=80 setting, and my longest exposure times were seven seconds.
I used a lightweight (2 pound) tripod to keep the camera still. The
shots on my web page are compressed by roughly a factor of three in
both dimensions.
Thanks for all your great camera advice. At some point, I want to
take some photography classes to learn better technique. In the
meantime, though, I'll be taking lots of new pictures.

Regards,
Scott

Absolutely stunning pictures, Scott. I really must use my tripod mode! A
couple of observations:

- there's one shot of an outside sculpture (p1000268a_bw) that looks as if
it's black-and-white. I guess from the file name that is intentional?

- there's one picture which shows some sky noise (grain) (p10002797a).
Was that cropped after taking?

One final thought might be to make an even wider-angle interior shot
assembling two or more images with a panorama stitching program. Did you
have a wide-angle accessory lens at all?

But great photographs! Does your wife do even better? Mine does!

Cheers,
David

Hi David,

Thanks very much for your thoughts on the pictures. I really need to look
at the sky noise in some of the shots that I cropped but didn't shrink in
size. Also, yes, the one b/w shot of the sculpture was intentional. I was
playing around with varying contrast and brightness on that one. I don't
have a wide angle lens, and I think I really need one for large
field-of-view shots. What would be my best bet for the FZ30? With my
lightweight tripod, I've found that I can carry the camera atop the tripod
with ease, even when I'm touring and snapping occasional pictures all day
long. And with the stability of the tripod, I'm having no problems at all
in avoiding blur.

My wife typically takes macro/detail shots, while I typically concentrate on
grandiose shots at places like cathedrals. She got some great gargoyle
pics, but neither of us got to see the National Cathedral's newest
gargoyle -- a huge stone Darth Vader head atop the front roof! :-)

And I DO want to learn how to stitch one image within others. For example,
I'd take shorter exposure stained glass window shots, then stitch them into
a longer exposure interior shot, for better light balance across such
images.

Thanks again!
-Scott :-)


"David J Taylor"
wrote in
message .uk...
Scott Speck wrote:
Hi David,

Happy New Year to you, too. I bought me and my wife his/her Panasonic
FZ30's, and we're both very pleased with our cameras! My first set of
pictures were taken at National Cathedral in Washington, DC, on
Saturday. You can see the pics at:

http://www.scottspeck.com/pictures/n...ral/index.html

For the interior shots, I used the "night scenery" setting to force
the ISO=80 setting, and my longest exposure times were seven seconds.
I used a lightweight (2 pound) tripod to keep the camera still. The
shots on my web page are compressed by roughly a factor of three in
both dimensions.
Thanks for all your great camera advice. At some point, I want to
take some photography classes to learn better technique. In the
meantime, though, I'll be taking lots of new pictures.

Regards,
Scott

Absolutely stunning pictures, Scott. I really must use my tripod mode! A
couple of observations:

- there's one shot of an outside sculpture (p1000268a_bw) that looks as if
it's black-and-white. I guess from the file name that is intentional?

- there's one picture which shows some sky noise (grain) (p10002797a). Was
that cropped after taking?

One final thought might be to make an even wider-angle interior shot
assembling two or more images with a panorama stitching program. Did you
have a wide-angle accessory lens at all?

But great photographs! Does your wife do even better? Mine does!

Cheers,
David

Scott Speck wrote:
Hi David,

Thanks very much for your thoughts on the pictures. I really need to
look at the sky noise in some of the shots that I cropped but didn't
shrink in size. Also, yes, the one b/w shot of the sculpture was
intentional. I was playing around with varying contrast and
brightness on that one. I don't have a wide angle lens, and I think
I really need one for large field-of-view shots. What would be my
best bet for the FZ30? With my lightweight tripod, I've found that I
can carry the camera atop the tripod with ease, even when I'm touring
and snapping occasional pictures all day long. And with the
stability of the tripod, I'm having no problems at all in avoiding
blur.
My wife typically takes macro/detail shots, while I typically
concentrate on grandiose shots at places like cathedrals. She got
some great gargoyle pics, but neither of us got to see the National
Cathedral's newest gargoyle -- a huge stone Darth Vader head atop the
front roof! :-)

And I DO want to learn how to stitch one image within others. For
example, I'd take shorter exposure stained glass window shots, then
stitch them into a longer exposure interior shot, for better light
balance across such images.

Thanks again!
-Scott :-)

Scott,

OK, if the "sky noise" image was cropped, that would perhaps explain why
the noise was more visible.

For wide-angle shots, I sometimes use my Nikon 8400 (24mm), or sometimes I
stitch a couple or three photos together with AutoStitch:

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

You may be able to get a wide-angle add-on lens for the FZ30, but for the
odd wide horizontal or tall vertical, AutoStitch can work very well.

I haven't yet tried combining different exposures, but that should work as
well. Fun getting the images aligned unless you are disciplined with the
tripod!

Cheers,
David

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 09:15:35 GMT, David J Taylor wrote:

For wide-angle shots, I sometimes use my Nikon 8400 (24mm), or sometimes I
stitch a couple or three photos together with AutoStitch:

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

You may be able to get a wide-angle add-on lens for the FZ30, but for the
odd wide horizontal or tall vertical, AutoStitch can work very well.

I haven't yet tried combining different exposures, but that should work as
well. Fun getting the images aligned unless you are disciplined with the
tripod!

Depending on your software, you might be able to use a stitcher program
to do that alignment as well. The software I use, Hugin, can output
multilayer TIFF files, one layer per source image in the stitch. GIMP
(and, I assume, Photoshop) can read these files in and set up layers.
You could then use the stitcher to do the alignment and do the blending
of the exposures in the image editor of your choice.

Alternatively, a tripod and a wide auto-bracket should generate a set of
images that are reasonably registered with each other.

-dms