Slap me Silly

Another 4 image pano of the rapids above the falls. I am super impressed with the Merge to Panorama mode in ACR. Maybe it's my old laptop or the program but it does take awhile for the images to merge, but when they do I am like wow great picture. Then a little polishing in Photoshop or Aurora 2019 and you're done.

This is a 3 image pano converted to B&W. You may click on any picture to enlarge.

Panoramas Scmanoramas

Here is an interesting tid bit I found in Camera Raw yesterday that I never knew existed. I can now make panoramas in Camera Raw direct instead of exporting to Photoshop.

Bring your selected pano images into Camera Raw and go to the top left menu and select all your images.

Then you also get the option to automatically enhance the images. I tried it out and it does a fine job cleaning them up. If you prefer to do it yourself just bypass this step.

Now choose Merge to Panorama and Camera Raw takes over all the heavy work and it seems to do a better job than Photoshop or any outside pano merge software I've tried. It does take longer but it automatically fixes a lot of things like content aware fill, perspective, layers etc. It gives you before previews which is really nice.

This is the final product. Made with the three images. I was pleasantly pleased with the results. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Portrait Lighting

The picture below of Greg and Chrissy was made without any soft boxes or umbrellas to modify the light. My studio has white walls and runs on the narrow side at 12"x24". I bounced two Nikon SB600's straight behind the camera and one SB900 used as a master bounced off the wall to camera right with the BFT. BFT ( black foamy thing ) invented by Neil van Niekerk. The guy's a genius so you should look him up. Anyway I liked the images so much I decided to follow up on this approach to my studio work. I added another flash to separate the subject from background, took some test selfies to see how it works. Below is a lighting diagram and the original shot and same image just cropped tighter. The major advantage of this technique is minimal eye glass glare on my subjects and the fact the speedlights are suspended from the ceiling I have no cords to trip over when shooting children and pets.

Greg & Chrissy

portrait session.

Upper Rapids

Niagara Falls State Park

American Falls