local gem // a Coronado ferry ride

When family visits to San Diego for the first time, I get to be a tourist all over again (although I still feel like a tourist most of the time, having lived here only a year and a half). So on a beautiful and warm Saturday afternoon, the Mister and I treated my parents to something we had never done before either: a short ferry ride from Broadway Pier to Coronado.

Gorgeous bay views, a little shopping area where we treated ourselves to ice cream, and duck and pelican-watching. It was perfect.

And just for fun, here's a quickie panorama I took with my iPhone :)

a left coast daytrip

Oh heyyy there blog, nice to see you again. Yeah, I've been neglecting you for a bit. You know how it goes...husbands come back from deployments, wives jump all over said husbands, and the wives wanna do fun things that make them pretty much ignore any blog-writing obligations. Oops.

And when a sister-in-law says she wants to visit San Diego for spring break, I happily play host and photo-document along the way.

...And obligatory instagrams...

:)

photoshop // panoramic stitching

A few weeks ago, Corey (the lovely model above) and I explored an abandoned house in Jamul, and while I took plenty of photos (mostly of Corey), this ended up being my favorite. When I asked her to stand in the middle of this road, I knew I wanted to essentially turn that top photo into the bottom photo by stitching a bunch of images together in Photoshop.

What makes this photo-stitch especially cool is that because I took all the individual shots using my 85mm lens at the maximum aperture of f/1.8, the final image has an exaggerated shallow depth-of-field while still achieving a wider angle of view. Disclaimer: I did not invent this method in the least. I first read about how to do it a couple years ago on Ryan Brenizer's blog (he didn't invent it either, just basically developed another use of panoramic stitching). If you want to read more in-depth about the method and how it works exactly, this post is extremely helpful.

For the purposes of this blog post, I simply want to share the steps I took to make this image, and what it looked in Photoshop as I was making it.

So this is the first photo I took. I shot it hand-held, with my focus set to Automatic, and my settings were 1/4000 of a second, f/1.8 at 100 ISO. Easy peasy.

Now this is the part where I took several photos of the space surrounding the image that I just took. I asked Corey to step out of the frame, I set my focus to manual, and I made sure to keep my camera settings exactly the same. I started at the top left and worked my way clockwise, overlapping my images as I went. The number of images you shoot is up to you, but you don't need a gazillion to make a good panorama. For this, I only used 12.

Now the fun part! I opened up Photoshop and went to File > Automate > Photomerge.

This window opened up, and I clicked Browse to select all the images I wanted to use. I made sure that the Layout was set to Auto and to check the box next to Geometric Distortion Correction.

This is the part where Photoshop does all the hard stitching work for you, while you can sit back, relax, make a cup of tea, pet your cat, whatever. Depending on how many images you use and how large the files are (mine were full-sized jpgs), this part can take several minutes. Just be patient.

Okay, don't freak out when you get to this point. Yes, this looks ugly as hell, but Photoshop isn't done yet. It's still working its magic. Like I said, paaatience.

Now we're getting somewhere! The stitching is complete. But as you can clearly see, my panorama isn't perfect. I could've taken some more photos to fill in the empty spaces, especially in the bottom left.

And this is just show you what the pixel dimensions were before I cropped the image. 8150 x 6210 pixels. 144 megabytes! Pretty huge. Which is another great thing about photo-stitching: because you're combining so many files, you get a much higher resolution image without any loss in quality. Which is perfect if I wanted to print this at a huge size.

So this is what it looked like after I cropped out the white spaces, and even so, it left a very large image to work with. The rest was just color and curve adjustments, and some sharpening.

And here's one more example of using this method that I did a few years ago. First is the original "before" shot...

...And the final image...

:)

some visual poetry for your wednesday

Choros from Michael Langan on Vimeo.

A chorus of women are borne from the movements of a single dancer in this dreamlike "pas de trente-deux."

This is beautiful, and dreamlike, and mesmerizing. And that is all I will write about it. Just watch it for yourself :)

bits of home // january

Winter in California: I don't hate it. More like a delayed autumn really. With lots of rainy days.

And leaves. So many leaves.

Dearest donkey tail succulent, may you live a long and fruitful succulent life. I promise not to over-water you like I have in the past. Sincerely, Me.

I'm pretty sure this is guava? Whatever it is, this is its first appearance since I've moved into this house. Also, if you look closely, you can see how the kittah successfully snuck into the shot. I seriously did not even notice this until just now.

tuesday tunes // The Peach Kings

Hmm, maybe this could be a regular thing? Tuesday tunes, it has a nice ring to it...we shall see.

So....The Peach Kings. I was listening to this first song today while driving. It was sunny and warm out, and hearing this made me feel like I should be driving to the desert, on my way to a shady meeting with people of a nefarious nature, à la Breaking Bad or something.

The Peach Kings - "Thieves and Kings" from Paul Trillo on Vimeo.

This next one is way more somber, but kind of fitting to my mood as of late. But the visuals are pretty rad.

The Peach Kings - Lonely from Paul Trillo on Vimeo.

a portrait session // Tea

Oh man. I've been away from this space for nearly a month, but honestly, I feel okay about that. But it's a new year. And one of my goals this year is to shoot more portraits. Of regular people. Friends. Strangers. All shapes and sizes. Close-ups of faces. Or full-length, it doesn't matter. There are no rules.

So a few weeks ago I visited my friend Tea in downtown San Diego, and as usual when I bring my camera along, an impromptu portrait session happened. I hadn't seen her since last year, when we worked together on this fashion shoot, so it was fun to turn the tables and photograph her for a change, rather than her designs.

Thanks Tea, for indulging me :)