Montreal In Pictures

March 23 2012

Having posted so many images yesterday from the student march, I took things a little slower today. Actually, I was suffering from HDR withdrawal since it’s about a week since I opened up Photomatix, and decided to just walk up the street on avenue du Parc and shoot the Montreal skyline from Parc Jeanne-Mance (just south of ave Duluth).

Before I get on to the HDR images. Yesterday I downloaded the free beta trial for Photoshop CS6. Something I have been wanting to do for a while was try Photoshop auto merge tool for panoramic shots. Not sure if Adobe made any upgrades to this feature, but for the following panorama I didn’t have to do anything other than crop the image slightly. I Just wish I knew of a good way of displaying panoramic shots on the blog – difficult to see much detail after it’s shrunk down to 800 pixels wide.

Panorama of Montreal skyline from parc Jeanne-Mance

In the past I often had issues with segments of panoramas having different lighting. After a bit of research on the web, I found where I was going wrong and will include the tip of setting your white balance to cloudy among some other tricks in a separate tutorial post in a few days.

Actually, it may not be long before stitching pictures together to make a panorama is obsolete. I’m salivating at the prospect of trying out the soon-to-be-released 14 mega pixel 360-imager camera by Tamaggo. This camera looks like it will appeal to a wide range of users (consumers and businesses) – particularly given it’s reported that it will be selling for around 200$.

A key benefit I see with the 360-imager is that it takes the 360 degree image with a single click. If you look closely (you may need a magnifying glass) at my panorama above, there’s a cyclist appearing 3 times – either that or some triplets were cycling up avenue du Parc.

If you’ve not checked out the egg shaped camera yet, you can find more details over on the Tamaggo website – no confirmed launch date yet, but I heard Q2, so hopefully not long to wait. Tamaggo is also on Twitter should you want to follow them to get product release news updates.

Tamaggo 360-imager camera

Okay, here are a couple of HDR images I shot this afternoon of the Montreal skyline as seen from Parc Jeanne-Mance. Both were 3 exposure bracketed shots, merged in Photomatix.