Speaking of Austin, Texas…
Wandered around downtown for a bit. Spent a little time in and around the capitol building. Lots of stunningly beautiful architectural detail. Could probably spend a day or two photographing and still want to come back for more, but I share a couple I was able to snag while there…
Silhouette of the salute to the Terry Rangers. There’s a couple quotes attached of which here’s one, “There’s no danger of surprise when the Rangers are between us and the enemy.”
I think the silhouette of the statue in front of the capitol dome tells more of the story of the place and has more depth than a straight shot of the dome. No my camera sensor is not dirty… Lights attract bugs. Bugs attract bats which is what you see in the sky above the dome.
Texas State capitol building and entry walk in Austin.
The wide view of the capitol building was made combining two exposures out of a 5 exposure sequence made with the Panasonic Lumix GX7. Each image was processed in Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) using the highlight and shadow sliders along with exposure and saturation. Even though the two images were made within milliseconds of each other when I placed one on top of the other there was a tiny registration problem. This can happen even when you have the camera mounted on the tripod so I use the technique below whenever I stack images for blending. Photoshop to the rescue!
Here’s how.
Turn the bottom layer from background layer into Layer Zero. Highlight both layers in the Layers Palette. Under the Edit menu select – Auto Align Layers. Make sure Auto Align is selected in the projection. I leave Vingette Removal and Geometric Distortion unchecked. Depending on the image and lens used you might want to remove Vingette. Click OK. In seconds the layers are perfectly aligned.
Next a mask is added to the top layer and painting with a brush and black chosen as the color allow any parts ot the image below to show through until the blending is to your satisfaction. You might want to save out the file at this point and continue any additional work on a copy of the file. If there was an error made in the masking the mask will still be available for adjustments instead of starting over from scratch.
Tomorrow we’ll go inside the capitol building for a couple photos….
Yours in Photography, Bob
