Welcome to the Tower of London everyone I'm here waiting for the Sun to set I've
set up my camera I found my composition what I'm doing today is I'm shooting a
panorama of the Tower Bridge as well with more London and the shard and what
I want to do is take pictures as the Sun sets and as the lights turn on as well
at during night and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to composite them in
Photoshop to have the Sun set and the lights on which should make a pretty
critical image excuse the headphones but it's a bit chilly and I forgot to bring
my beanie today so I'm gonna be wearing them so the goal right now is to wait
for the Sun to set behind the buildings here and capture an image when the Sun
is right behind the Town Hall of London and in a sunburst mode and then wait for
the sky to turn red and then wait for the lights to turn on as well and I'm
going to be capturing about five or six images side to side to stitch a panorama
and I'm also going to be bracketing to do an HDR image so I can have maximum
dynamic range and to be able to stitch the panorama perfectly I've leveled my
tripod perfectly and have manually focused on the Town Hall of London
and now we're just waiting for the Sun to set we have about 10 minutes before
the Sun actually sets where I wanted to set so until then I want to talk to you
about how I actually found the location and know exactly where the Sun is going
to set and I use an app called Sun surveyor and it has a great feature
which is basically a street view but it shows you the position of the Sun on the
map on the time of the location where you want to shoot so you can pinpoint
very accurately where you want to be how you want to shoot so as you can see on
the app I can see that the Sun is going to be roughly behind the city hall where
it's going to be touching to for me to be able to get that Sun burst so the
final show that I actually want to get is one of the most challenging shots
I've ever tried to make because I have to basically do one panorama with the
Sun touching the buildings one panel with the actual Sun set and the colors
of the sunset and then one panel during blue hour with all the lights lit up and
make sure that they all match perfectly so that I can overlay them in Photoshop
and then use every layer that I can to basically get the image that I have in
my head line up in the final image I'm not sure if it's actually in a workout
but I'm going to try my best if not the final image that I want in my head maybe
I'll get a cool sunset image see the Sun is slowly approaching the buildings and
what I'm going to do is I'm going to shoot
three Panos one with f-16 one with f-18 one with f-22 so I can take my pick of
the starbursts that I like I'm gonna have to move fast because it's going to
be setting quite fast got my camera set to aperture priority I'm shooting with a
manual white balance so I don't get any flickering on the colors like I said the
tripod is perfectly level so I can rotate the camera without having any
issues with perspective I've got my bracketing on 2 minus 1 0 and plus 1 for
the exposures obviously the time will be automatic because I've got an aperture
priority mode my ISO is set to 100 so I could have many more and a noise and I'm
using a remote trigger to avoid any shake while taking the pictures I also
have the camera set to a timer with the remote trigger so you can take the three
exposures from the bracketing automatically which is always nice I
don't have to press the button three times
it's almost time so I'm going to start taking pictures now just because there's
light on the bridge and I don't want to miss that
and remember when you're shooting panels always shoot wider because you're
probably going to have to crop in a bit in post
I think I got the shot I wanted with the starburst well the Sun burst and now I'm
gonna keep on shooting throughout the evening so I can capture the best light
possible basically there is some nice light going on on the bridge right now
so I'm going to take another panel and then I'm just going to wait until the
lights turn on in about an hour an hour and a half hopefully it all fits
together I have no idea if it will but I'm hopeful okay the Sun has gone down
now and the light is pretty nice we have orange colors everywhere so I've taken
the next panel with the light that I want to be the base color and where I'm
going to overlay the Sun flare and then overlay the city lights as well
my prayers have been answered we have some clouds that caught the
light of the Sun I was really worried that it would just be completely clear
skies which I'm not complaining it doesn't really happen in London some I
cut yeah is like I can't complain but now we have clouds which is quite
amazing so all right the lights are started coming on so it shouldn't be too
long now and it's a good thing because it's actually freezing now and I'm kind
of shaking from the cold so probably another half an hour until we finish the
shoes
now remove the bracketing from the camera I have got f11 so I can have a
wide depth of field and so everything is in focus and maybe I can get some slow
shutter and get the river to be nice and smooth and I'm gonna shoot the panel
again and I'm gonna overlay the lights on the previous unarmed
huge undress jumping in real quick to tell you what I learned from this shoot
and what I would do different in the future the image that I got is pretty
much what I had in mind however it's not quite perfect not everything aligned as
I would hope and there's a few reasons for that
so first lesson that I learned is that Lightroom and Photoshop actually don't
stitch panoramas the same way every time that you do them so I show up many
panoramas over that evening and I decided to use five of them for my final
image and even though my tripod didn't move at all during the time that I was
shooting the images didn't stitch up the same way and that's because Lightroom
and Photoshop use an algorithm that changes every time that you stitch even
if it's the same images even if it's the same Panora it's going to stitch it the
different way every time so what that meant for me was that I couldn't just
stitch all the panels and then overlay them in Photoshop I tried that and it
didn't work they were totally out of place and they didn't match up so what I
could have done to make this process a lot easier is actually use a panorama
head which is basically a prop that you put on your tripod that offsets the
camera so that the centre of rotation is actually the center of your lens and
these heads also have set degrees that you can rotate your camera and it kind
of clips into place rather than going free-flowing like I did so that would
have meant that all my images were exactly lined up and the same and then I
could have just stitched every image independently make them the way I wanted
and then put the final panorama together at the end which is actually what I did
this time around anyway but because my actual photos didn't match up perfectly
I had to auto align them in Photoshop and there were still edges that just
didn't match up I try to work with masks and transforming things around to make
it as perfect as I could but yeah if you zoom in real close you'll see that some
some lines don't actually match if I were to do this again I would definitely
buy this tripod head because it would have saved me a lot of hassle also I
would have liked to have shot the individual images on in
vertical so that I would have a lot more pixels the reason I didn't do that is
because my computer is 8 years old and I don't think I could have handled it it
actually really suffered you took me about a week to stitch all the HDR
images and then stitch them into Panos that I later found out that wouldn't
line up in Photoshop and then redo the process in Photoshop from the beginning
so yeah it turns out I did bite off a lot more than I could chew but with
perseverance hard work and Photoshop and lower expectations I got an image that
I'm actually quite happy with and I know that if I want to do a similar thing in
the future I will have to go and buy this panorama tripod head because trust
me would make my life a lot easier so if you would like me to make a tutorial of
how I actually made this shot from beginning to end click on the little eye
icon up there and vote on the pole yes or no and I'll be happy to make an extra
video on that and if you guys liked this video give me a like and let me know in
the comments and consider subscribing for weekly videos and hey go out and
make some pictures and I'll see you next week