The other reason it took so long is that once the image is done, Photoshop takes a century to save the image as a tiff — First there is “Generating Full Resolution Composite,” then it has to generate preview, then it has to prepare to save, and lastly it has to “Save Large Document Format.” LDF is a format like PSD, however it doesn’t have a 2GB cap on each file, so you can save enormous images to the file container. In this case, the document was 9.5GB.

After saving the document, the upload took a very long time as the final compressed Tiff file was 1.3 gb. I uploaded the panorama to GigaPan.org using their uploader while I was staying at a hotel, and as a result, it took quite a long time using their insanely fast 120kbps connection.

Anyway, the panorama turned out nice, and I am happy to have it finished as it took so long to complete.

–Scott

This is my first post to this blog, out of High School, without being graded, without any of that.

Yesterday, on my way downtown, as I was leaving my house, I spied, not 1, not 2, but 3 rainbows in the sky (you can only see two in this photo). I happened to have my camera handy, so of course I had to photograph it. I decided that since I had just finished my final on HDR, this would be a good chance to utilize it. I took three bracketed exposures on AEB (auto exposure bracketing) handheld - that was no easy feat.

Although I did get several photos, I only chose one that was great (the one above). I edited a few more, but they didn’t turn out as planned.

I have decided that it may be a smart move to invest in Photoshop CS5, as this trial won’t last forever, and I seem to be using it quite a lot. But that is for when I actually have money to spend.

I have also started using a new border on this image… I’m not sure if I will keep using it, but it is different, so I thought I would try it out. It consists of enlarging the canvas by .5in, creating a solid color layer of a dark grey, adding a pinstripe white border to the image, as well as a drop-shadow to give it “pop.” I also have included the stripe copyright. Tell me what you think in the comments if you have any opinions toward it.

Technical Information

Anyway, here is the exposure information of the photos

• Shutter: 1/30, 1/125, 1/500th sec.
• Aperture: f/8.0
• ISO: 100
• Focal length: 28mm
• Canon 50D with 28-135

The images were shot on Manual, with Auto-Exposure Bracketing and motor drive mode so that I could get the three exposures in nearly the exact spot - it’s easier to use AEB as you don’t have to change anything while shooting.

Map

Rainbow Google Map

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI

-Scott

This past week, we were ordered to create a masterpiece movie poster for a hypothetical movie called “The Student.” Although the stated goal was to inspire creativity into our projects, I think Twitchell’s real goal was to get free graphic design for his upcoming blockbuster of the same name.

Anyway, about my poster… the design process consisted of every other design project I have ever done: creating a canvas with the correct dimensions (18×24 @ 300dpi). After that, I went to look for inspiration at some of the links provided. I saw this tutorial for a “Trendy Typographic Poster Design“. After seeing this, I started creating text around the canvas with the word “STUDENT” many times, at 45° angles, in different sizes. After creating that, I took an old image and placed it behind the 45 text layers and did 3 gaussian blurs with a 255px radius. Then I cloned out most of the overly bright areas of the blur, then blurred it again. After that, I desaturated the image to create this:

At the time, I wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted to create a documentary, or a horror movie. I kinda decided to go with an ominous-documentary. I added a texture, a free one found on Flickr, of concrete to give it a more distressed look. I also changed the blend mode of the text group to soft light, this made it so that the text fit in with the background.

The next part that I added was text at the bottom. First, I added a semi-transparent black rectangle at the bottom half of the canvas. From there, I added the title, and other text relating to the movie. On the main title, I duplicated the text layer, rasterized it, and added a mild motion blur to give effect to the text, and make it stand out. I then turned down the opacity of the blur to make it less prominent. The credits, which use the font “SF Movie Poster“, at the bottom read:

SCOTT STURGES PICTURES, IN ASSOCIATION WITH STURGES PHOTOGRAPHY, PRESENTS THE FILM “THE STUDENT” FEATURING STEPHEN STURGES AND BRANDON DESIMONE. WITH CASTING BY BRUCE TWITCHELL. DIRECTED BY SCOTT STURGES VISIT WWW.STURGESPHOTO.COM FOR DETAILS.

I also added a MPAA rating. I found this vector image on Wikipedia, and it is under the GPL license. I converted the SVG to a raster format with Inkscape, and imported it into the poster. Lastly, I signed my image with my fancy new Wacom tablet.

The last part of the design was to shoot the photo to go in the main portion of the poster. I knew that I wanted to have an image of a student with books scattered around them, doing something relating to the subject of the photo.

I went downtown with Stephen, went to a narrow alley way, in a slightly shady area of town, with many of my school books and strobes. Stephen had some coffee with him, so I felt that it defined his character. I scattered my books around him, and behind him. I placed a flash in front of him, as I was shooting into the sun, and wanted to make sure that his face was visible.

I took several images from behind, however, after looking at them, I decided that I like the ones from this angle better. So I fired off quite a few, and settled on this one. When I saw it on camera, I knew that this would be the best.

The process for processing this image involved processing the RAW image, doing a little sharpening, and finally working it into the image. I intentionally oversaturated and sharpened the image, as I feel that when it is printed, it would look best with green grass and blue skies. I really like how this image turned out, and Stephen actually wants it for his Facebook.

My inspiration for this poster came from a number of sources, as well as pure creativity from myself. I have already posted one link to the site where I got the idea to use diagonal text for the background, but I also a tutorial called “Create an Intense Movie Poster“. Although the connection is not necessarily there, this tutorial really got me rolling on the project. I do not think, however, that it has any actual influence on any of my current poster though. Finally, I have some obvious inspiration from every movie poster that I have seen in the last few years, as I don’t think I could have had a good idea of what a movie poster should look like without seeing some.

Below are the contact sheets for the images used for this poster, if you blow them up, you can see the different angles that I took photos from to try and get the final image.

Contact Sheet

Technical Information

• Camera: Canon 50D
• Lens: Canon 28-135mm (Just received back from Canon repair center!)
• Lighting: Canon 430EX triggered with Cybersync
• Shot in RAW, processed with Photoshop CS4

Focus208 Slideshow

Focus208 – Coeur d’Alene from Scott Sturges on Vimeo.

In an ongoing attempt to photograph the state of Idaho, otherwise known as Focus208, I have taken some photos around downtown Coeur d’Alene, Id.

I chose to photograph the two blocks between Sherman and Front Avenue, and 4th and 6th street. I wanted to show some of the “urban-decay” (as in the alley ways and rundown walls) as well as the new urbanization (such as the new towers) of downtown.

The photos were processed from Camera RAW in Photoshop CS4, where light adjustments were made, and sharpening was applied. Unfortunately, I over-sharpened some of my images, but for the most part they all look pretty decent. They were then processed through my fancy Focus208 Photoshop action, which essentially resizes them, adds a border, adds my name, and saves it as a jpg.

After editing the photos, I made them into a slideshow (above) and added the music, Analog Plan by Thomas Schneider, found on Freeplaymusic.com. The slideshow was compiled in Picasa 3 for Mac from Google in 720p resolution (because 1080p takes too long to upload). I actually liked using the program a lot despite it being slightly glitchy software.

This project took me an insane amount of time for some reason, it seemed that I was overthinking some of the process, as it took me several days to edit the photos. Just prepping the video and making this post took over 4 hours.

There was some inspiration from Digital Photography School, Urban Landscape Photography Tips.

Below are the contact sheets of the photos taken on the assignment.

Center of map

map

map

map

balloonlelss markjer

Lastly, there was an extremely blurry shot of Josh Stevens that I took while shooting this project that Twitchell (linked due to request) liked, so I’ll post it for your viewing…

Throughout this semester, I have photographed the night many times… seemingly too many; and as I was shooting this assignment, I decided that I was going to do something different. While contemplating other options, I simply decided to go with my shots, and write a tutorial on night photography, and post-processing of said shots.

CHAPTER I: Capturing the image

I am going to divide this tutorial into 3 chapters, with individual steps within them. This first chapter is capturing a great image. I will leave the composition and location up to you… but there are some important aspects of the capture that you should keep in mind. The first is the exposure: while photographing the night, one needs to make adjustments to make sure that an adequate amount of light is allowed into the sensor (or film) of your camera.

ISO

While shooting at night, I like to set my camera to ISO 100. There main reason for this, is noise. While shooting at night (or anytime for that matter), the last thing I want in my images is digital noise. The higher of ISO one has, the more the noise one will have in their photo.

APERTURE

While shooting at night, I like to close up my aperture for two reasons, 1: focusing at night is difficult, so with a closed up aperture, I can get close to the correct focus, and still have most of the picture in focus. This is because as the aperture closes up, there will be a deeper depth of field of focus, making more of the image in focus. 2: It creates light stars. What are light stars you ask? Just look at the image to the right. The bright lights at the restaurant Beverly’s have turned into brilliant stars, instead of glowing orbs of light. For my image, I shot at f/13 to achieve this effect. I would go even smaller, but unfortunately I would have to lengthen the exposure of the image, and I really didn’t want to. Think of it this way… go out at night and look at a rather bright light, and squint your eyes… the light should have a similar effect as to these light stars in this image.

In short, to get light stars in your images, close your aperture to as small as you can go.

SHUTTER SPEED

As a result of closing the aperture and turning down the ISO sensitivity, I needed to compensate the exposure with a looooong shutter speed. And as with any long exposure, one needs to stabilize their camera some how. My stabilization of choice happens to be a tripod… but if you do not have one for your use, you can rest your camera on a stable object. You will get very blurry images if you try to hold your camera no matter how stable you think your arms are.

For my image, I used a 63 second exposure to compensate for the lost light from the f/13 aperture and the 100 ISO.

While shooting, you will have to play around with your exposure until it is just how you like it. It really varies on how much light is available for you to work with.

One last thing on exposure… if you reach a point where you need to have an exposure longer than 30 seconds (the limit for many cameras), you will have to put your camera in BULB mode and either hold the shutter button and time yourself (I use my iPod’s timer), or get a locking remote (some even have timers built in).

CHAPTER II: Post-Processing

The second half of taking night shots, is the post-processing. In this section, I will describe the steps that I took to make the image look like it does above.

RAW

Straight from camera

RAW Settings

When ever I shoot photos, my camera is always in the RAW setting. This enables me to make adjustments that the camera would normally make. Think of it as dark-room adjustments when developing film. If you click on the second image, you can see the adjustments made. Below is the image right after converting from the RAW image.

TOPAZ ADJUST

To the left, you see, there are still some adjustments to be made to make the image look like my final product. You will notice there are 4 gnarly lens flares, the top part of the tower is too dark in relation to the lights, and the sky doesn’t look as cool. So I’m going to do some magic.

First, I used a Photoshop plugin called Topaz Adjust. This plugin essentially enhances details throughout the image. I chose a few settings, including some de-noise, and enhanced the light and color. Once I was done, the result below was displayed.

Although the adjustments did make the image look very cool, I felt as if it was taken too far, and looked too fake. So I brought in the original image and created a layer mask and brushed back some of the first image to take away some of the fakey-ness (new word).

The red areas are where the Topaz is being applied, whereas the blue/purple areas are the original image. I feel that this gives the photo a much more natural look.

LENS FLARE

The next step was to remove the 4 flares from the light. I first went about removing the flare on the far left. This one was the easiest as the sky is pretty much a blurry pattern. So I just used the spot healing brush and Photoshop took care of the rest.

The next one was the far-right flare. This one was slightly more difficult, but still rather simple: I took a rectangular cut of the building just above the flare and pasted it below. Then I faded the edges by masking the layer to make it look natural.

The inner lens flares were taken on by a slightly different approach. For these, I created a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer. From there, I set it to the Yellow mode.

After setting those settings, I created a mask so that the layer would only affect the two inner flares. After making those adjustments, I was finished with the editing of the image.

CHAPTER III: Saving for the Web

After editing, saving for the web it the next step. For me, I simply resize the image, apply a border, add my watermark to the bottom, and save it.

Resize

Generally, I don’t ever save an image wider 1500 if it is landscape, or 700 wide if it is portrait – simply to save bandwidth. I use the image size tool (cmd+option+i) and type in my values.

Border

The border that I usually use for my images consists of a black border with a white stripe through it. This is quite simple to make. First, I make sure that my image is flattened, then I enlarge the canvas (cmd+option+c), and I choose the relative check box. Then I make it 6 pixels wider and 6 pixels taller.

After completing that step, I repeat it twice, once with a white stripe of 4 wider and 4 taller, then again with a black stripe of 12 wider and 12 taller. Once I’m finished with this, the border is done. I have created an action of this to speed things up.

Watermark/Name

I always add my name to the bottom of my images so that if someone swipes them, it will have my name on it. I feel it is probably unlikely that my work is stolen – considering that I’m not really the most famous photographer… but it is still a good habit to get into.

First, I create a text layer with my name. I usually use the font Impact set to white. I choose the font size based on what looks best. Once I’m done, I set the layer style to add a stroke of 1 px black (or 2px) and add a drop shadow. These are simply to add to the æsthetic properties of the image.

SAVING

Lastly, I save the image. This really is the easiest step of the process. Simply, I open the save-as dialog, choose jpeg, name it, and choose a jpeg quality (usually 8 for the web).

I hope that this tutorial has given ideas for those wanting to try out some night photography. None of the steps discussed in this tutorial are necessarily required to do night photography, they are simply the steps I used to create this specific image.

1st image

Downtown Coeur d’Alene, ID. HDR effect to get the vivid colors. Approximately 1 minute shutter.

Map of photo

2nd image

Photo of lake Coeur d’Alene in CDA, ID. A little HDR was used with Photomatix in this photo as well. I ended up submerging my camera in the process of taking this photo. Lukily no damage was done to the camera. This photo was used in my Junior Class yearbook at Coeur d’Alene High School. The caption in the yearbook reads: “Scott Sturges glided through the water gracefully like a wild seahorse and jumped out and snapped this glorious landscape of Coeur d’Alene Lake.”

Map of lake photo

Senior portrait created for Josh Stevens. The second one is one that he edited and ended up using.

Map of Tubbs Hill