Category Archives: cityscapes

Aerial Panorama

October 4, 2015 by admin | Comments Off

A nice somewhat foggy morning with the sun rising and the early morning fog started to dissipate.

This panorama taken with my quadcopter taken at an altitude of 100′ above my local flying place, called Kite Hill. The uav was rotated and each frame was taken until the entire area was covered. Then the images were stitched to make the panorama, the sky was edited to fill in the upper part that the uav could not photograph. Click on the play icon and if you want to go full screen press the transparent icon in the upper right. You can scroll around in the panorama and look up an down. Enjoy.

[pano file="kitehill/kitehill.htm" preview="kitehill/khlp.jpg" width="900" height="500"]

Image of the week #47

November 25, 2012 by admin | Comments Off

Table for two? Taken in Little Tokyo at one of the malls. Fuji X-Pro 1, 35mm f1.4 lens.

Image of the week #46

November 18, 2012 by admin | Comments Off

Here is a nice moody image, this building is in downtown Los Angeles, in Little Tokyo. It is the original Japanese-American Museum and the new one is right next door. The lights on this building really make it interesting at night, and it was a rainy night when this was taken. It had just started to rain on me. I was using the black and white mode for the Fuji X-Pro 1 and this just worked out well so I did a little touch up and here it is, as nice moody night shot.

Image of the week #22

June 3, 2012 by admin | Comments Off

I am really liking my Fuji X-Pro 1, wonderful small camera with really great image quality. I pretty much carry it with me every day. Here is a shot from the Griffith Park Observatory looking towards downtown Los Angeles. This was shot with the Fuji X-Pro 1 and the 18mm f2.0 lens at ISO 200 and 1/350 at f11.

Image of the week #19

May 13, 2012 by admin | Comments Off

I am still loving shooting with my X-Pro 1, this weeks image is a statue at the Huntington Library, this statue resides between two galleries. Taken with the 35mm f1.4 at f8 and ISO 200. Converted to black and white with Silver Efex Pro 2.

Image of the week #3

January 22, 2012 by admin | Comments Off

This week I had a harder time getting some shots, really did not shoot a lot, got caught up in the day to day of life. This shot was an experiment, (aren’t they all! ). Taken hand held inside a dimly lit church, All Saints Episcopal, in Pasadena. Shot with a Samyang 14mm f2.8 using a Canon 1DM4, ISO 3200, f2.8 and a 3 shot bracket at +/- 2 stops. Starting exposure was around 1/60. This is also a vertically stacked panorama, some call a vertorama, as it shows all the way back behind me as well. So the top part of the image is actually above and behind me, I was bent over backwards while shooting this sequence. Field of view is around 75 x 176 degrees. The panorama is made from 4 frames, each 3 exposures, Ptgui did a great job of stitching although there are still some stitching errors. I am pretty pleased with it, especially getting the panorama to stitch without using a tripod or pano head.

Downtown Los Angeles – A different perspective…..

May 25, 2011 by admin | 1 Comment

Here are a few shots taken from a small private plane at night over downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood. It was a really fun trip and an interesting experience, the pilot Fei, was great and very accommodating. We were in a Piper Cherokee, which is a low wing plane, so that meant we had to roll the aircraft for me to get a shot without the wing in the way. You can see it in a few shots. The night was rather pleasant and we took off from El Monte airport. This was on Friday night, May 20, 2011. I have to say this was extremely difficult photography, the subject is dark with a some really bright highlights, the plane is moving at about 100mph and was constantly moving (which was a good thing for a fixed wing plane!). So I had a lot of images that showed rotation, and also movement. Shots were taken with a 21mm f2.8, 85mm f1.8 and a 50mm f1.4, all wide open and very high ISO, which varied depending on the overall brightness, even with the fast lenses and high ISO it was tough to get the shutter speed high enough to not show motion blur. This is something I definitely want to try again and I think I will have a lot better success. Some of the shots, especially the close ups over the building reminded me of ‘Blade Runner’. Click on any thumbnail to see a larger version, thanks for looking!