Up Island Roadtrip

We love to head out on Highway 1 and explore this beautiful island we call home. This is the view off Cobble Hill Road facing northwest towards Duncan. - Fern

Labour Day Weekend

I thought I'd close this week's posts with another shot of the Legislative Assembly Building with usual scattering of tourists at this time of year. This coming weekend, a long weekend called Labour Day here in Canada, marks the end of summer since children return to school next week and Canada prepares for autumn and winter. Tourist season isn't really over - it is year round here - but the number of tourists certainly drops after Labour Day and drops again in mid-October when the last of the year's cruise ships docks at Ogden Point. It's hard to believe another summer has come and gone so quickly. I hope yours was as trouble-free and pleasant as ours.

Lens Distortion 3

Stefan Jansson suggested in a comment on yesterday's post that a good experiment would be to shoot a panorama using a standard lens and that was precisely the thought that occurred to me as the next step. The photo above of the Empress Hotel was shot using a 35-70mm zoom at 35mm. The panorama consists of 9 shots altogether - 5 across the bottom and four on top. I wish I had included a bit more foreground but most of the foreground was Government Street with busy traffic and wouldn't have improved the photo. Also I would probably have needed a third strip of photos across the top if I had aimed lower for the bottom strip of photos. Aside from that, the distortion in the above photo certainly is less than in the single 10mm wide shot below, although the latter (shot several years ago) is much more dramatic. However, when all is said and done, it seems to me that some level of distortion is inevitable because of the nature of lenses. Even our eyes distort reality. In fact, we probably never know what anything really looks like. However, it behooves a photographer to at least have some awareness of how his or her equipment is affecting the image being created. This series has helped me to understand a bit of what happens when you point a lens at something.

Lens Distortion 2

Yesterday I said I would try an experiment to reduce lens distortion on wide angle photos. Above is the BC Legislature through a 10mm wide angle lens. Note the way the walls seem to slant towards the center on the edges of the photo. Below is a stitched panorama of the same scene composed of two photos. Here all the walls are not sloping in but sloping out and if you compare the rooflines in the two photos you will see that in the top photo the rooflines are nice and straight but in the bottom photo they are sloping. Hmmm. Back to the drawing board I guess....

Lens Distortion

Last year around this time I was exploring the way lenses distort reality. All lenses distort reality to some extent. (This, in my opinion, puts paid to the purist argument about the truth of images taken directly from the camera without further processing as against images that have been altered or enhanced after being downloaded from the camera.) Notice in the top photo how the Hatley Castle's walls appear to slope inward. This was caused by using an ultra-wide angle lens at its widest setting (10mm) in order to get the whole building inside the frame. The problem I was trying to deal with had to do with how to correct this lens distortion. The solution I found is below. Sometime later I returned to Hatley Castle and took a whole series of shots (10) with a 50mm lens. 50mm lenses are generally agreed to produce photos that are most like what our eyes see. These were then stitched together and straightened using software called Hugin. It produces enormous panoramas (the original of the shot below is over 10,000 pixels wide). The end result (below) is certainly much closer to what we see. The next challenge is to photograph the Legislative Assembly Buildings using the same technique. Stay tuned!