Hello I'm Graham and I hope everyone's having a great day welcome to today's
video in which I'm hopefully going to show you one of my methods for capturing
stunning landscapes. Now when we think about landscapes we normally think about
wide-angle lenses so we capture old wider Vista but the problem with using
wide-angle lenses is that it distorts the perspective between the foreground
and the background you'll find the foreground is much more larger than in
real life compared to the background which will be very small so if I was to
take this picture with my camera was set to 17 millimeters which is the widest
angle I have today you'll see that we've got an unnatural perspective and it
doesn't give me the full Vista that I particularly want in this shot now the
method that I used for this particular shot is one called matrix panorama and I
use a matrix of five horizontal shots two three vertical shots and I use the
camera in the portrait mode and I have it set to an aspect ratio of four to
three or three to two dependent on what the output resolution and format size
that I want so in this particular case I've got the camera set to an aspect
ratio of 3 to 2 for the process to work when you stitch these images together in
Photoshop or any other program you need to have everything in the manual mode so
you need to have manual white balance so today I'm going to set one of the
presets which is the sunny preset you need to have manual focus you need to
have manual ISO manual shutter speed and manual aperture so each of those
pictures taken in this 55 by 3 matrix will all have the same exposure now the
secret to this is using the widest aperture you can with your 50 millimeter
lens so in this case it's going to be about F 2.8 we select a particular point
of focus and in this particular case it's going to be the oak tree in the
background now the reason for selecting a fixed focus plane is that when we
stitch these together the image plane that's in focus will be parallel to that
tree before ground will be slightly out of focus and maybe the background will
be slightly out of focus but they'll all match together so it gives me a true
perspective on what this actual format looks like so if we try to shoot this
wide angle you'll find that you're getting distorted foreground to
background ratio by using the standard lens the image we create is as we are I
see it so you'll get a natural looking image when you combine all these
together so I'm going to set the camera in manual mode get my exposure set on
the first image which I'll take of the tree which is going to be the central
limit / central subject in this image I'll get my exposure from that in the
automatic mode and then I'll set those into the manual mode so that I've got a
consistent exposure so I've done that I'll show you how I take this picture
right so by using the aperture priority mode of determine what the exposure is
for the main principle point of this landscape and it's gives me an exposure
of one 16 hundredth of a second at F 2.8 and an ISO of 100 so I've set the camera
white balance to a preset of sunny I'm gonna turn the lens to give me about a
fifty millimeter focal length which gives me the natural perspective and now
I'm going to take the scene I'm going to use a method by which I work across the
image in a set of five drop-down come across a series of five drop down and
then come across as a series of five now each image was overlap slightly so
Photoshop has something to work on to be able to stitch those images together and
the way I do this visually is to look at something that's in the right-hand part
of the viewfinder when I'm working from left to right look at the image on the
right hand side they move the camera until that has moved over to the
left-hand side take the next shot and then look what's on the right-hand side
bring that over to the left-hand side and take the shot etc so that I've got
an oval up and the same when I'm going top to bottom I find something that's at
the bottom of the image and I move that to the top for the next frame so I've
got consistency over the whole metering so let me take those 15 images now and
then we'll put them into Photoshop and stitch them as a panorama and then we
can crop it to however we need so let me take those 15 images first of all
so there I've got the 15 images which are all our imports into Photoshop and
we'll use the panorama merge facility make them into one image one of the
other advantages of this method is that we're getting low noise because we're
stacking the images to give me five images in the line we've got 20
megapixel horizontal and something like 12 megapixel vertical resolution when we
scale that back to our standard size in Photoshop obviously the noise is reduced
as well so it gives us a noise advantage if we want those larger images let's
import those into Photoshop and have a look at the final result begin by
selecting file then automate and photo merge from the Photoshop menu now click
on browse and navigate to the menu where your images are cat select all the
images and press ok select the reposition option from the layout and
then click OK depending on the power of your PC it may take several minutes for
the process to complete but when it does you should be seeing something like this
on the screen you can now use any filters such as they Camera Raw filter
to adjust the color saturation intensity etc of the image you've got here in
Camera Raw and adjusting saturation sharpness and other parameters that I
think would improve the image quality
finally reducing the airport size to a standard dimensions I'm using 4,000
answer width for this particular image so here's the final image on screen
reduced down to 4000 pixels wide given us the noise advantage because i2 has
been compressed so there we are that's my method for creating a stitched
panorama giving you a natural perspective with a wider field of view
compared to your standard wide-angle shot so here's a wide-angle shot at 17
millimeters compared to our matrix of 5 by 3 captured in a three-to-two aspect
ratio now one other advantage of this method is if you can't get far enough
back to get everything in the frame that you're trying to capture the image on
screen now I captured in a local cemetery and this particular statue I
wanted to get the whole of it in focus but unfortunately I couldn't get far
enough back with the lens that I had because there was a wall in the way so
the way around this was to capture again as a matrix using a something like 4 to
3 matrix in this particular instance I was able to capture the whole the
sequence and then stitch together again in Photoshop to give me that one image
now there's an advantage in this as well it means you can use longer focus lenses
to give you the effect of a wider angle with a shallower depth of field
something that they call the Bren Iser effect if you've actually seen that term
used before it's a method used by Ray browser to create stunning wedding
pictures that he has a bride and groom in a larger Vista with a shallower depth
of field then you can get with your standard lenses so it's called the Bren
Iser effect if you wanted to research that but I use a similar matrix method
for both my landscape and for images that I can't get into shot with the one
single shot hope you found that useful if you're new viewer to the channel
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there'll be a link in the description below so until the next video thanks
very much for watching please do take care and I hope to see you all in the
next one good bye for now