Dedham

Photographer's Note

Rowing boats for hire on the river Stour just below the bridge at Dedham on the Essex - Suffolk border. This is the area made famous by the painter John Constable.

This is a stitch of two portrait orientated exposures made using the free Microsoft ICE panorama stitching software. This is a remarkable program, in that it seems that you can just feed in a whole collection of images taken of a scene, and it will stitch them vertically and horizontally at the same time.

dta, macondo, saxo042, tyro oznaczył to zdjęcie jeko użyteczne

Critiques | Translate

dta (98848) 2010-08-10 4:36

Hello Peter ,
This plunging view on these little wooden boats is very pleasant , in a peaceful green scenery . I wonder if it would not be better in a classical format , without the low part and the left one ( I can not do a WS today ) . But this is your choice of framing .
Best regards

macondo (20449) 2010-08-10 4:37

Hi Peter.

Nice array of timber boats fanned out in the dappled light coming through the trees. The combination of the green and brown tones is very pleasing, mingled with the reflections. The detail in the boats and the buildings and walls behind them is very good. I've heard about this program somewhere recently, but not used it; in fact I've never tried my hand at stitching. It's a pity the upper right side is a bit over-exposed, relatively speaking. I wonder if you could do something with that area using a layer mask, or perhaps crop a little. Perhaps the boats would look better, too, if the ones at the top of the line were closer to the right edge of the picture, but it's hardly important anyway. I notice you took the shots with a very small camera - it's disconcerting when you see so many good shots on TE which did not require a heavy investment in heavy equipment!

Regards,
Andrew

saxo042 (38078) 2010-08-10 12:00

Hi Peter and welcome back!
A beautiful diagonal line of boats along the river here. The reflections of trees mix very pleasantly with the water lilies into the foreground. There is a very peaceful mood here, where are all the people? An interesting note about this stitching software, obviously a very good one; I can´t detect any traces of joints here. I will have to try this too.
Kind regards
Gunnar

tyro (30513) 2010-08-10 16:00

Hello Peter,

It certainly is nice to see you back again and posting pictures here.

And this is a lovely picture with which to mark your return. The line of the boats and the water's edge make a strong diagonal lead-in to the picture and the composition is both strong and pleasing. Who, though, am I to try to educate my grandmother in the art of egg-sucking when it is yourself who has produced such wonderful "composition analysis" workshops on this site?

However, and perhaps it is something to do with differing monitors, but I do agree with Andrew (macondo) in that some of the parts, especially at top-left, look overly bright or even "blown out". I'm going, therefore, to try a little workshop using a plug-in in PSE6 about which you yourself told me - EasyFilter SmartCurve - slightly to reduce the contrast, and then fiddling just a little with colour saturation and lightness.

Nonetheless, a fine picture and one made all the more interesting by the use of yet another program of which I was not aware - Microsoft ICE panorama stitching - can you just download it from Microsoft or is it already hidden somewhere in XP/Vista/7?

Kind Regards,

John.