Saturday, April 15, 2006
Hurst Spit
Four hand held images stitched.
It is a long walk out to the castle and that gravel is hard to walk upon too, low conversion of effort to motion! I hoped to show the enormity of the spit.
Sea to the right, Isle of Wight ahead, Keyhaven and sheltered salt marshes to the left, Hurst castle and lighthouse at the end.
Permalink / posted by and copyright of Rex : 6:43 PM
Comments:
PS. In the original TIFF you can see the individual legs of those two people at the bend in the spit!
So it's best to go by boat?! But then we wouldn't have got this splendid shot. It's a great use of a panorama and a real pity we can't see it large. I think that it gives a good feel for the size of the spit (which I've never been to) and the backlighting is used most effectively to depict the layers of the view. The wide angle is also used well to show the calm water to the left, sheltered from the wind coming in from the right. This should be in the 'best views in Britain' book!
Rex: if you email a wider copy of this to my blogadmin email address I will put it on the server and add a link here. Anybody who wants to will then be able to see the bigger version 'off page'. I suggest 1200 pixels wide, but could be larger if you don't mind people scrolling.
I've been wondering how to deal with panoramas....I've some vertical panoramas which are even more web unfriendly.
fine panorama. well composed and crafted. refreshing different comparing many panos I've seen on another photo site. never seen such a landscape before. there seems sea right and left and hills/mountains in the distance. love the LHS lightning and restraining colors.
yes if possible would love to view it larger.
Yes you can get a ferry from Keyhaven to/from the Castle.
We walked out, sweet talked our way into the Castle free for a cuppa and cake in the café and then took the ferry back.
The ferry used to go to the IoW but sadly they have stopped that service.
This is a description of the castle.
One of the most advanced of the artillery fortresses built by Henry VIII: used as a prison for eminent 17th-century captives, and later strengthened during the 19th and 20th centuries. It commands the narrow entrance to the Solent.
I've corrected the spelling of Hurst Castle!
Interesting composition, virtually spliting the picture in two with the spit, to good effect. The lighting on the boats, to the left, provides the centre of interest but then one's eye tends to roam the rest of the picture and gets a great feeling of the vast expanse around the spit. You can only just see the figures but they add a sense of scale.
For those of you with a larger screen, there is now a 1200 pixel wide version of Rex's picture here (link) .
Apart from the fact that it looks so good, I am impressed by the sharpness of the detail: each of those pebbles shown off to perfection.
Rex, just one query. Am I right in supposing that this was one exposure (in each of the four frames)? Did you expose for the sky and have to pull the spit out from RAW? It's just that the spit does seem a tiny bit darker than the light would lead one to expect to see it (unless the pebbles are very dark). I have lost quite a few shots this winter by taking a casual shot without bracketing and then deciding later that I like it but not having the latitude in RAW to pull the dark land out because the exposure for the sky and the land were too far apart. This is not a criticism merely a technical query, and the overall tone here is right for the picture.
Many thanks for the link, although I suppose it ought to be in the text below the photo.
Four hand held images! If I tried that I’d have to spend oodles of time rotating is PS. I like the light glinting off the water on the left and the shadow detail on the pebbles on the right which gives it a wind swept feel. It leaves no doubt that there’s an erosion issue that this particular causeway has to deal with. I’m impressed by the exposure which I expect must have been awkward to get right. There’s a lot of brightness to have to deal with which would have made it all too easy to lose the detail of the pebbles in the shadows. Was some blue in the sky lost trying to compensate for this? That’s likely the way it would have worked out for me.
OK this is from memory except the first bit which now I've gone back to check it is that this is from 5 portrait images, not 4.
The first image I took was of the boats on the left with the brightest bit of the image centred left/right but at the height that I wanted. I checked the histogram to ensure the camera handled the reflection. I was in P mode but had used the knob to get F11 because I wanted the DoF to include the spit in the foreground.
I used the marks on the screen to get a reasonably consistent horizon.
The (5) images were stitched with Panorama Factory letting it do it's thing! (I recommend this software if you like panoramas but are not obsessed with them!)
The resultant image had a very slightly non-horizontal horizon. As it is a l o n g image I used the perspective mode to correct the horizon rather than the arbitrary rotate method (invtan H/L). If you don't know that method let me know, it's great.
The last thing I did was to crop the sky as there were multiple lens flares, 1 OK'ish, 8 not OK!
6 images taken.
Image 1 taken to check that the exposure method would cope with the reflection.
Image 2 to 6 used for the panorama.
The position of image 1 if used would have been right half of 2 and left half of 3.
Phew! :o)
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I've been wondering how to deal with panoramas....I've some vertical panoramas which are even more web unfriendly.
yes if possible would love to view it larger.
We walked out, sweet talked our way into the Castle free for a cuppa and cake in the café and then took the ferry back.
The ferry used to go to the IoW but sadly they have stopped that service.
This is a description of the castle.
One of the most advanced of the artillery fortresses built by Henry VIII: used as a prison for eminent 17th-century captives, and later strengthened during the 19th and 20th centuries. It commands the narrow entrance to the Solent.
I've corrected the spelling of Hurst Castle!
Rex, just one query. Am I right in supposing that this was one exposure (in each of the four frames)? Did you expose for the sky and have to pull the spit out from RAW? It's just that the spit does seem a tiny bit darker than the light would lead one to expect to see it (unless the pebbles are very dark). I have lost quite a few shots this winter by taking a casual shot without bracketing and then deciding later that I like it but not having the latitude in RAW to pull the dark land out because the exposure for the sky and the land were too far apart. This is not a criticism merely a technical query, and the overall tone here is right for the picture.
Many thanks for the link, although I suppose it ought to be in the text below the photo.
The first image I took was of the boats on the left with the brightest bit of the image centred left/right but at the height that I wanted. I checked the histogram to ensure the camera handled the reflection. I was in P mode but had used the knob to get F11 because I wanted the DoF to include the spit in the foreground.
I used the marks on the screen to get a reasonably consistent horizon.
The (5) images were stitched with Panorama Factory letting it do it's thing! (I recommend this software if you like panoramas but are not obsessed with them!)
The resultant image had a very slightly non-horizontal horizon. As it is a l o n g image I used the perspective mode to correct the horizon rather than the arbitrary rotate method (invtan H/L). If you don't know that method let me know, it's great.
The last thing I did was to crop the sky as there were multiple lens flares, 1 OK'ish, 8 not OK!
Image 1 taken to check that the exposure method would cope with the reflection.
Image 2 to 6 used for the panorama.
The position of image 1 if used would have been right half of 2 and left half of 3.
Phew! :o)