In this video I visit the Pantheon in Rome to take on another fifteen-minute challenge.
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Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey.
Hello i'm Gavin Hoey and you are watching AdoramaTV. Brought to you by
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you join me in Rome for a 15 minute Photo photo challenge.
So I'm at the Pantheon a fantastically
historical building but before we go inside lets’s start with the fountain.
We have a beautiful fountain here. Rome seems to love fountains. I want to get a shot
of a this. So I could shoot this in just standard
settings. Just grab my camera and away I go,
but thats a little bit sharp, it's a little bit crisp.
I'm using an Olympus OM-D-EM5 Mark II
with a 12-40mm lens.
It’s a great little travel camera and despite being small, I’ve got
all the functions of my usual cameras. So I can come in here
and I can choose the smallest aperture number, f/22.
I can choose a low ISO, I can go
ISO 100.
I can just set exactly what I want. So let’s just come and do that again.
Zoom in nice and close.
Yeah there is some great motion in
in the water. Okay we better move on before we become part of this wedding I
think. Okay so I want to do
a picture of the fountain and the Pantheon in behind it.
So I’m going to zoom in 40mm. Thats the equivalent of 80mm on a full frame
camera.
That gives me a fare bit of reach. Now the only problem is I’ve got to watch out for tourists. Now we are here really
early in the morning
but there is already loads of tourists here. But with a little bit of
patience, thats pretty good. Now sometimes just to give it a bit more of a dynamic
look might just tilt the camera. Just twist it a little bit. Just get a few different angles
Now with these shots because I have nothing to rest on I’m going to have to for that faster shutter speed
Well theres a few shots of the fountain on the outside but of corse we’ve got to go inside.
Now,
I may not be able to give you a running commentary live in there because it is a
religious building after all. So I
may have to respect that. Let's head inside and see what we can find in there.
It’s not until you come inside that you really get a idea of the scale and
the beauty. It’s nice a cool.
I think this is probably the center
It’s fairly dark in here as well so I just need to increase my ISO to compensate for that.
So I’m going to pull it up to 1000 ISO.
There is a massive contrast difference as well. Between
the hole and the rest of it. I’m just going
to switch to HDR mode, and I can take five shots.
Hold it really still. This cameras lovely, it has an HDR function built right in, so I don;t have
to worry about bracketing. That brilliant.
Let’s see what else we can find by going to all the edges.
I like that fact.. If I’m here at the edge
and I look up, I get these pillars dramatically
arcing over the top.
Still in HDR mode.
Fantastic. Good stuff.
Let’s keep wondering around.
A 15-minute challenge wouldn’t be complete without a panorama. So
working at f/4, I'm getting a shutter speed of a
30th of a second. I’m just going to dial that into manual.
Take a picture of my hand so I know this is a panorama sequence.
Put my camera in upright format
and around I go.
Just stopped something. Need to get my camera off my BlackRapid
strap. Switch it back into aperture-priority mode.
Choose my aperture. Let’s go with
f/2.8. Wide open. This is when live view
is gonna be really handy in this camera. Because
I can focus by touching the screen.
So much easier than trying to do with my other cameras.
Okay we’ve got time just for one more
shot I think. So let’s just wonder up to the main alter at the front and see if we can grab a shot there.
Well sadly my trip to Rome came to an end all too quickly.
I could have spent half a day in the Panthoen alone and the rest of Rome,
well it was equally as beautiful. I am definitely
going back to take more pictures very soon. So
what about the images? Well the pictures I shot anything that had the the hole in
the top of the Panthoen's roof.
Well I took them in HDR mode so I'm gonna need to do a bit or processing to
see what I got.
Let's have a look. So I shot everything in RAW
and using the HDR function I came away with five
RAW files, each one a different exposure by two stops.
So what I need to do is to join them together. So here inside of Adobe camera RAW
Camera Raw
I can do that by going to the little menu fly out in the
the option in the corner there. Choose select all,
and go back to the same menu and choose
merge to HDR. Now I can do that here in the newer version of Adobe Camera RAW
and I could do this in Lightroom in the same way or I could use Photoshop's
own merge to HDR Pro or any HDR software
I choose. Now what I wanna do is align the layers, because these were hand-held
I need to actually get the the software to line things up. No tripods
really were allowed inside of the Panthoen. At least I didn't try it anyway.
So it's going to take a moment or two just to gather those images together
and create the HDR image.
So let's start with the composition. I think it's quite good like that but I
wonder if it would be better if I just turn it on its side.
Yeah that's definitely better. So let’s spin that around. I think the colors look
slightly cool so
maybe just increasing the temperature just a little bit. That looks pretty good
and I definitely wanted a moody feel. So bring the exposure down. I wanted this
area
to definitely be sort of the highlight but you can see this white spot here
really is the highlight.
If I go right the way down there’s actually.. Thats a same theres no detail
in there. Now it could be that a cloud went across at that exact moment.
It could be that I should have taken some more exposures,
either way we'll need to fix that inside of Photoshop. So we'll come back to that.
We’ll just do some basic editing here and we’ll bring the highlights down, the
shadows up and pop a little bit of clarity and some richer colors in there. That looks pretty good.
Now I would like a little bit more detail out from these deep shadow
areas down here. So I’m just gonna do that by using the adjustment brush
and I'll just increase the shadow amount.
I'll paint a little bit more detail just so theres a hint of
something in there. I’d also like some highlight detail back around the top as
well so
let's make another new adjustment brush. This time I'll just turn the
highlights down slightly, I'll just paint in that area there.
I think it looks a little bit cold there still, so maybe just a wee bit more on
the temperature.
Now it looks fine but if I actually go and have a closer look, there maybe a couple of
other bits and pieces I want to do.
There is a slight halo. There is a very slightly sort of blueish
halo around this opening here. So I reckon I can deal with that quite neatly
by going to the
HSL/grayscale. Finding the saturation option
it looks blue to my eyes so if I move it backwards and forwards you can probably
see even clearer on the video. So
we'll just bring the blues down in saturation so they disappear. There's
really is no other blue in the shot, so that's fine.
Whilst I’m here a couple of other house keeping measures.
It's always a good idea to put some noise reduction in and similarly
coming along to lens correction, finding the color option,
I’ll removed chromatic aberrations. Although I have found this lens actually had relatively
little chromatic aberration.
So thats all good. Rights so from there I can open up the image back
into Photoshop. So that large white hole at the top
its gonna draw your eye if I leave it as it is
and
all I need to do really put some sky in there. So
let’s add some sky. Now in theory it should be pretty straightforward. We’ll just get
the
magic wand. We’ll click inside and then we'll fine tune the
selection with the
select and modify. I'll expand it by a couple of pixels
and I'll go back to select, modify
and I’ll feather it by a couple of pixels as well. That should remove any weird halos
I get around the joint. I do need to go to select
and Inverse and then I can add a layer mask to this
just so I cut a hole through there.
I now have a hole ready for my new Sky. So any sky would do I guess but
this is a shot from earlier in 15 minute photo challenge.
On this one either the clouds have parted or
well maybe I had a another exposure but I was able to pull some sky back
from that shot.
So let's add that in, because it's in context and from the fifteen-minute Photo Challenge.
So I'll just selected it all and copy it. Come back to the main picture
and past it in, and of corse it has to go on the layer below. So I’ll drag that down
underneath and wouldn’t it be lovely if it just fitted straight in.
Yeah no the world isn't like that. That doesn't always work, does it? So
I’m just going to have to use a bit of free transform. Control ’t’ on PC and
Command ’t’ on a Mac, and then we can just a slide that into position.
Like so. Okay and there you go.
There is my final HDR
picture completed, and it has a great sky
and real drama too
So there you go, 15 minutes around the Pantheon in Rome.
Nowhere near long enough if you're a photographer coming to Rome
this to be on your must do list and please
give yourself longer than 15 minutes to go around. There if you want to see more videos from
myself and the other amazing presenters here
on AdoramaTV. You know what you’ve got to do... You’ve got to click on the subscribe button.
I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching.
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