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Archive of ‘Photography’ category

Personal, Photography, Travel | 0 comment

Milwaukee Buildings

City Park

The last few posts have been describing some of my travels through the city of Milwaukee. It has a lot of photogenic landscapes with the tall buildings, historic monuments, and natural environments that the parks, lake, and river provides to visitors. A few years ago, the park planners even put in a very beautiful man-made waterfall that beautifies a water drainage way from the park to the lake below:

Lake Park waterfall - ©TimeLine Media
Lake Park waterfall – ©TimeLine Media

Nearby, we spent some time by the North Point Water Tower. Situated high above Lake Michigan, it is a beautiful Victorian tower that contains a 135-foot-tall standpipe that helped to being clean water to the city from 1874 until the 1960s. A traffic circle now surrounds the tower which makes clean photos easy to make from many sides.

North Point Water Tower - ©TimeLine Media
North Point Water Tower – ©TimeLine Media

Downtown was also a really cool place to take photos. We ran into other photographers that were walking along the 3-mile River Walk that follows the Milwaukee River behind many restaurants, bars, and residences. We had a great time seeing all the people starting their weekend fun by meeting friends after work. There was lots of boating activity from small catamarans, to larger dinner-board cruise ships.

River Walk

River Walk, Milwaukee, WI - ©TimeLine Media
River Walk, Milwaukee, WI – ©TimeLine Media

We walked through the Historic Third Ward with their boutiques, bars, and the Public Market. On the way back up the River Walk, we also stopped by to see the Fonz! He has a photogenic spot by the river – he could probably jump over shark in the river right behind him… ahem. I should probably quit while I’m ahead. Have a great weekend!

Bronze Fonz - ©TimeLine Media
Bronze Fonz – ©TimeLine Media

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Personal, Photography, Technology, Travel | 0 comment

Panoramic photos – Tech Thursday

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Trying to get in a large scene in one photo can be difficult if you do not have the right tools with you. While traveling, you may see panoramic scenes that you come across that are a challenge to get in one frame. This is especially true if you have a fixed lens camera. Moreover, a limited amount of time to get your photos adds to the problem. All the photos on this post were made with the Fuji X100s which as a fixed 35mm equivalent lens. It is not particularly wide, and I had no chance to get the entire tower of Milwaukee’s City Hall with this camera. Especially with the tour group moving on to the next point of interest, I had to go quickly. If you come across something similar, remember Photoshop for later. It is very good at creating panoramas from multiple images taken in series. For this attempt, I took this series of photos:

Source images for panorama - ©TimeLine Media
Source images for panorama – ©TimeLine Media

Post Processing

Starting at the bottom of the building, I took seven photos from the street to the top. I made sure that there was overlapping areas in each photo. Having this overlap will help the software find common points that will make for a more seamless panorama. One tip that I would give when you attempt this with landscape formatted photos going in a vertical direction for large tower structures such as this would be to turn change the orientation of the photos to portrait orientation prior to merging. Here is what the source images looked like after turning them 90 degrees clockwise:

Source images for panorama turned clockwise - ©TimeLine Media
Source images for panorama turned clockwise – ©TimeLine Media

After this, let Photoshop do the rest of the work! Open all the source images, then select File > Automate > Photomerge. Next, select the “Add Open Files” in the dialog box, and click OK. Photoshop will now work on the images, and will pop out a merge file:

Merged photos from Photoshop photo merge - ©TimeLine Media
Merged photos from Photoshop photo merge – ©TimeLine Media

Because of the perspective differences with each photo in the panorama, this is the result. There are some areas where there is no data resulting in the blank spaces on either side of the photo. I just use the crop tool to remove these areas to get the final, large panoramic image!

Milwaukee City Hall - ©TimeLine Media
Milwaukee City Hall – ©TimeLine Media

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Personal, Photography, Travel | 0 comment

Milwaukee Tour

Wisconsin

Thanks for all the responses from the post yesterday. I had some questions on the photos that were taken out of the plane window. The photos that I posted were all from the Fuji X100s. Although you are allowed to use small electronic devices during takeoff and landing, I did not turn on my phone out of habit. So I took the photos with the small mirrorless camera, then cropped the images in Lightroom so that you can see more of the details out of the window without the frame of the plane, the wing or the engines in the way.

Wisconsin from the air - ©TimeLine Media
Wisconsin from the air – ©TimeLine Media

This is only the second time that I have spent any time in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My mother always takes a city tour when she goes to a new place, so we decided to give that a try. We found Untapped Tours of Milwaukee through an online search, and made it down to City Hall to meet the tour guide. This was probably the best thing we could have done with our time!

Untapped Tours Milwaukee

Untapped Tours bus - ©TimeLine Media
Untapped Tours bus – ©TimeLine Media

The tour stopped at all the sights around the city. With the foggy, but nice weather, there were a lot of opportunities for photos, but more importantly, we found all the places that we needed to visit later. The tour started at the impressive Milwaukee City Hall. Even though the building was being renovated, the size of the building and the scale of its tower was impressive both inside and out.

Milwaukee City Hall clock tower - ©TimeLine Media
Milwaukee City Hall clock tower – ©TimeLine Media

Since we were on a tour, I did not have a lot of time to setup a photo of the building. I just took out my Fuji X100s, and took a series of photos from bottom to top. My thought was that I would combine the photos later in a vertical panorama in Photoshop.It worked! I had to work on the photo with some adjustments due to the way I shot the original images. After the tour, I also had the chance to take more time and make an HDR image. I’ll post more about that on the next Tech Thursday post.

Milwaukee City Hall - ©TimeLine Media
Milwaukee City Hall – ©TimeLine Media

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

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