Sunday, June 29, 2014

Sunday Early Edition

Sort of early.
Early for me anyways.
It's Sunday don't you know.
Anyways, the other day I got my first authentic Rollei accessory.
Seems that Rollei made a ton o'stuff for their cameras, the only thing is the real stuff costs some bucks.
Overpriced if you will, compared to third party stuff that does the same thing.
Especially now since it's all vintage.

























This thingy set me back like fiddydolla, but it does do something practical.
It's a panorama thingy that attaches to the bottom of the camera:

























The way it attaches is sort of important because what it does is it sets the focal plane back behind the pivot point of the tripod.
I read somewhere that it makes a difference.
When you are doing panoramas anyways.
The fiddydolla thingy also has ratcheting stops, 10 in all so I suppose that means 36 degrees each, that corresponds to the field of view of the lens:



















That's a three shot pan.
So you set the bubble level on the tripod, then you set the bubble level on the fiddydolla thingy and shoot your set:



























Those pictures are backwards by the way, the camera actually pans left to right.
The fiddydolla thingy creates an overlap so that you can put your panorama together easier.
In the olden days the method was to glue your images to something then take another picture of it so it came out seamless.
Today, there's panorama stitching software, your phone probably has it, to put your pictures together.
I don't have access to Photoshop since I'm not in school and Lightroom doesn't really stitch stuff together.
What LR does do in a roundabout way is create triptychs; you can put three photos in a row:














Sort of like that.
I'm not doing it right for I'm loosing a lot of file size, but I'm still figuring it out.
As far as putting the shots together you still have to go in and crop out the overlap so the three images fit a bit tighter:














Sort of like that.
Despite having the same camera settings in all three pictures, you can see the lighting change on the water.
It was a partly cloudy day and the sun was moving in and out the clouds so I sort of messed up.
Still, that fiddydolla thingy has some potential.
I'm gonna go out again and see what I can put together.
The only bad thing is that I gotta lug my tripod around and lemme tell you, it's made of carbon fibre but after a couple of miles it might as well be made of lead.
I think I need a lighter one.
Quest for Tripod (QFT)?
Maybe.

2 comments:

GreenComotion said...

How about a a monopod, Limom?
They can be light weight.
Or, better yet, rigging something up on your bike to fit the camera and use that as the bike as a camera stand?
Just saying….

Peace :)

limom said...

Monopod won't work. the exposures are too long.
I do on the other hand, have just what you're talking about; a thingy that clamps on to other thingys with a camera mount on the end.
I gotta go and get it from school.
Only problem is that it weighs just as much as the tripod!