Every few months I go out with a few photographer friends for a few drinks and a meal, and sometimes we take a few pictures too, though it is really more of a social event. But in October our walk was rather different, partly because it was a prelude to attending a book launch by another of our group of friends, Mike Seaborne, taking place that evening in the Isle of Dogs.
I’ve a long relationship with the riverside path at Greenwich, one of my favourite walks over the years, beginning back around 1980 when the area was highly industrial. In recent years there have been closures of parts of the path where riverside flats were being built, but the last part re-opened just a few weeks before we walked it, and with this in mind I proposed we meet at North Greenwich station and walk into Greenwich.
Mostly I was interested in taking panoramic images and all of those shown here have a horizontal angle of view of over 140 degrees and a vertical field of view of just over 90 degrees and are in the normal 35mm 1.5:1 aspect ratio. Occasionally (usually by accident) I take them in 16:9 widescreen ratio which my Nikon D810 defaults to if you go into Live View in movie mode even if you are taking still images. Often I crop them to more panoramic format, typically 1.9:1, which is equivalent to using a rising or falling front on the camera. For landscape images it is generally vital to keep the camera level to avoid a curved horizon, and the D810 can display both up-down and left-right level indicators.
Lightroom by default corrects fisheye images to rectilinear perspective if you use the lens profile, which is frankly nonsensical. Fortunately it is possible to edit the profile to give no correction. In converting to rectilinear it throws away most of the image and gives you a fairly normal wide-angle view. Rectilinear perspective can’t really handle angles of view greater than around 90 degrees as I found using a 12-24mm lens. For most subject matter anything shorter than 16mm (97 degrees horizontal) was hardly usable, and I was very seldom happy with pictures I took at 12mm (113 degrees.) The 147 degrees of these images is simply out of range.
Very occasionally I’ll take a picture with this 16mm lens (or its 10.5mm DX equivalent) which looks fine exactly as taken, but for most scenes I’m thinking as I take it of a rectangle not quite as it appears in the frame, but defined by the centre of each of the four sides of the frame, knowing that I will lose the four corner areas. This is I think a ‘cylindrical’ perspective, exactly like I made for around fifteen years with a succession of ‘swing-lens’ cameras, where the lens rotates around the centre of a part circle of curved film, typically giving images with around a 130 degree angle of view.
There are quite a few software programmes that can perform this conversion, including both freeware and hugely expensive panoramic imaging software (which can of course also combine a number of images.) When I wrote for money on the web I was able to test a wide range of these, money no object as they came free (though sometimes time-limited.) They all did simple jobs like this well.
I’ve ended up using Fisheye-Hemi, now sold by Imadio simply because of its convenience as a Photoshop plugin (it also works with other software which can use Photoshop plugins.) Recently I’ve upgraded to the latest version which is a Lightroom plugin, even more convenient for my workflow. I now don’t get offered free software, but this isn’t hugely expensive, though a weak pound doesn’t help.
You can see these pictures (a little larger) and more – both panoramic and normal rectilinear – on My London Diary at Greenwich Walk.
Our walk ended at the Pelton Arms which has a good range of real ales and is less of a tourist attraction than the riverside pubs. If you are readling this on the day it is posted, unless the weather is really foul, I’ll be out and walking off a little of that extra Christmas food today.
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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
To order prints or reproduce images
________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________
There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
To order prints or reproduce images
________________________________________________________