A few questions...

[tasadam]

Time for a bit of fun.

Who would like to have some guesses about this image?


This image is a thumbnail, click on it to open a larger image.

Focal length used to capture the original?
Original file size? (bytes)
Original file size? (pixel dimensions and DPI)
Lens used? (It's a Nikon fixed focal length)
Post processing, if any?
Any other tips, tricks, or tomfoolery?

I'll wait for some guesses before coming back & letting you know.

BIG hint - all is not as it seems.

[photohiker]

Focal length used to capture the original? -> 50mm
Original file size? (bytes) --> 12Mb
Original file size? (pixel dimensions and DPI) --> 4256 x 2832 DPI is irrelevant, but I'll guess 300
Lens used? (It's a Nikon fixed focal length) --> No idea.
Post processing, if any? --> Cropped to 1200px × 481px
Any other tips, tricks, or tomfoolery? --> Dunno, but it looks like the rhs of the image has been radically stretched.

I'm just guessing this. The distortion is weird, so I really have no idea - it looks like extreme W/A corner distortion, but the transition seems too quick to me, so I'm guessing someone has been playing I suppose it could also be the result of lens damage, you haven't been dropping things again have you Adam?

[Jellybean]

The transition from the scree slope to the campsite clearing seems too abrupt - does this campsite, as pictured, actually exist or is it the result of some careful editing?

[ollster]

Looks like it's just across the way from King David's Throne (if so, no camping, naughty, naughty!). Or whatever the big lump in the middle of the walls near The Temple is called, I forget.

But the area I'm thinking of would be a couple of hundred metres from the scree so obviously some trickery going on!

[stepbystep]

HeHe nice job,
other than the campsite addition I think you have probably stuck a new sky in there, I regularly replace the sky, damn weather.....
tell me you are doing more productive things with CS5 than this Adam???
sbs

[eggs]

Checked my photos and am 90% sure this is a real site.

The shadows indicate he was hidden behind a small line of pencil pine at the base of the big scree in the middle of the Western Wall.
You would not see this tent from the track.

The sky could be changed, but I suspect maybe the tent has been added - as it looks "wrong"

[frenchy_84]

have you used a fish eye lens (or atleast a very short focal length lens) and then cropped the left side, because the right of the image appears distorted as if a fisheye lens has been used however the left side doesnt?

[ILUVSWTAS]

You guys have all got good eyes. I couldnt see anything wrong until it was pointed out, the right side definately looks "stretched" and the sky definately looks wrong!!

How does one change the freaking sky?? I really need to learn how to use Photoshop, or the office version whatever it's called!!

[pazzar]

changing the sky is easy, it just requires you to cut out the outline of the original sky, and placing a new image on a layer behind it

[ILUVSWTAS]

Yes it SOUNDS easy..............

[eggs]

Well Mark - I know someone who got rid of a whole mountain range by making it look like cloud....

[ILUVSWTAS]

Haha true.. But I was lucky enough for the sky to be white, I just had to get the pen thingy, select white and brush it out to match.......

[Son of a Beach]

Does look a lot like the spot half way along the bottom of the west wall but I thought there should be more of a steep bank immediately behind the flat ground.

[tasadam]

Checked my photos and am 90% sure this is a real site.

The shadows indicate he was hidden behind a small line of pencil pine at the base of the big scree in the middle of the Western Wall.
You would not see this tent from the track.

The sky could be changed, but I suspect maybe the tent has been added - as it looks "wrong"

The red bit is wrong, everything else you say is correct. I am standing on a man-high rock that has a big natural right angle cut out in it, and some idiot had used the area for a campfire. I destroyed as much evidence of it as I could, including a broad scattering of the firewood pile.

How does one change the freaking sky??

Made me laugh.

OK, pretty much everything is as it appears, the tent was there, the sky was (mostly) there, and yes there is some distortion evident.
But there is a trick involved, a clue might be why I am asking some of the questions I have... or what the BIG hint is.

Anyone want to have a go at any of the questions? I suppose it's a bit unfair... Time will tell. I will tell, in time.

[ILUVSWTAS]

Ohhhh your a cryptic sod!!

[Liamy77]

changing the sky is easy, it just requires you to cut out the outline of the original sky, and placing a new image on a layer behind it

i like to use layers too- with the top layer (Foreground) semi-transparent when working on top layer only and just delete out the sky i dont want -zoom into pixel level and you get no edges showing..

[tasadam]

No layers.
Want a closer look? Is this the same image?

1a.jpg (317.7 KiB) Viewed 15518 times

[Liamy77]

it sure isn't the same resolution!!!
can i get a high res copy of the file?
then i'll have a go at it - there may be some sharpening around the edges of the cliff tops or maybe some softening of the sky perhaps (looks a bit pixelly there) and i agree that there is some distortion on the RHS suggesting wide angle focal lengths (I assume we are talking digital focal lengths??) Hard to tell depth of field etc at this res...
Seems to be some discrepency with the angle of the shadows maybe - comparing the trees with the tents?
But i wouldn't put money on it untill i had a proper look for stitching or pixel lines levelling etc..

[tasadam]

can i get a high res copy of the file?

What's your monthly download limit???

I have worked out why it's all stretched on the right side, and when I have time I might have another go.
Just working on the same technique but a different image at the moment, it takes a while.

[Liamy77]

are you trying to use the sperical effect to counteract a wide angle focal distortion?

[tasadam]

are you trying to use the sperical effect to counteract a wide angle focal distortion?

No.
Another clue, there is no wide angle distortion in the image that I took.

[Swifty]

I suppose it's a bit unfair... Time will tell. I will tell, in time.

Long exposure time? Under moonlight, perhaps? Might explain the noise on the right hand side? Is the image a stitch, perhaps?

[tasadam]

Is the image a stitch, perhaps?

Now we're getting close......

[alliecat]

I think it's a composite of maybe 8 or 12 shots, (4 horizontally by 2 or 3 vertically) taken at around 90mm focal length. Each original image would have been pretty big so the composite would be some huge size (in pixels) - say 20000 x 12000.
I'm guessing around 1Gb in file size for a jpg. Other than the stitching and the fake sky, I think there might be a shadow of the photographer removed from the foreground (given the long shadows of the trees).

I don't know what the "all is not as it seems" means though...

[eggs]

Some stitching software can be selected to match sides by turning a rectangular photo into a parallelogram.
If this were a stitch of 2 photos at about the middle, then the RHS photo may have been stretched into an angular parallelogram.
The final stitch could then have been cropped to leave the strange stretching effect on the RHS of the picture.

I also would have said your Hallmark insignia on the tent is not the same as the actual image - the shadows match, but the symbol and rope line do not - and cannot see how "New Zealand" is on this?

[Liamy77]

from the resolution given i can't pick any "outta place/unaligned pixels, nor could i get any differenceds in lighting by tweeking the levels to their extreme (you can pick some stitched pics by how each photo levels differently sometimes) sometimes the stretch lines like the blur can come from the clone tool too but i cant tell yet.

[tasadam]

Is it time to reveal all? A stitch of two photos? Huh... A stitch of 8 or 12 photo? Not even close!
A stitch of 50 photos!

Some might have picked up on the fact that I bought Adobe CS5 Design Premium which includes Photoshop CS5.
There is a photostitch feature that I decided to have a play with, so I needed a panorama. Went browsing through my image library and found a walk I did in 2007 when I went to the walls, I had the 50mm (equates to 75mm on the D200) lens on at F16, 1/30 second, all manual settings so the exposures were the same, manual white balance too which is important when doing pano's.
So, I copied these 50 high res JPG's into a folder and called it megastitch. Opened CS5 photostitch and selected all 50 images, auto.
Went to bed.
Next morning I discovered that it had automatically lined up all these images and I ended up with an image that I could crop to a rectangle to reveal 35814 x 14356 pixels. At 300DPI that's 303cm x 121cm, a seriously big print (hence the BIG hint). I thought the crop of the side of the tent might have given the resolution away.
It was too big to save as a JPG, so I had to save it as an 8 bit TIF file, the file size was 1.5Gb.
Which was a lot better than the layered image that was there before the crop, 8.5Gb.

But as you can see it stuffed the right side of the photo - all stretched, weird.
Also there was a bit of a chunk of blue missing so I had to copy & paste selective sky, not much. Other than that, you are looking at what I saw, no "fake" sky, no shadows removed... And some serious resolution when you zoom in.
When I told Photoshop to display the full image on my screen (40" LCD), it was showing me 2% of the image.

So I decided to try to walk before I could run... Took a panorama of 24 photos that I took yesterday afternoon and stitched them, this time selecting the option Collage rather than auto.
http://www.redbubble.com/people/tasadam ... ls-pumping
A much better result, but not happy with the exposures of the JPG's out of the camera.
So I edited each individual image from RAW into 16 bit TIF and stitched them. An equally big image that I got down to 35Mb.
The full description of that image is in its write-up.

In short, I am seriously impressed with CS5.
So now I am trying to stitch these images again with Collage rather than auto. Stay tuned for the result. It takes a while.

[alliecat]

Well I was headed in the right direction with my guess I did think the sky was fake cos there seemed to be a halo around the mountain tops in the jpg, but that must have been an artifact of the jpg compression or the scaling.

It's incredible what photoshop can do these days. That really is an amazing tool. Being able to produce such enormous images from a much smaller senor camera has a lot of potential. It's going to keep Adam and his computer's CPU busy for a while, that's for sure!

The Dip Falls photo is stunning - nice work Adam.

[tasadam]

The Dip Falls photo is stunning - nice work Adam.

Yes you were on the right track...

Just been having another hack at the Dip Falls, haven't corrected the slope on the water yet, but the saturation and contrast levels etc are a bit better -
http://www.tasadam.com/forumstuff/bushw ... f/Pan2.jpg
(176Kb, 1200 pixels wide)

Shame about the sky but I can't be bothered trying to patch that, it would look too fake then I think. I try & keep things looking real.

[Liamy77]

pretty amazing job for auto settings!....

magic looking spots too!