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With great controls comes great responsibilities. Unlike Point & Shoot users who often have the benefit of a Panorama Assist mode, DSLR users have to control everything themselves. This is more work, but allows for greater flexibility while shooting images for a panorama.

The basic principle of capturing a panorama is to ensure utmost consistency between images. This means that focal-length, focus, aperture, ISO, shutter-speed, exposure, white-balance and image parameters all have to match exactly. Other than focal-length, these settings usually have both automatic and manual modes. The key is to lock each setting before shooting. Let’s go over each one:

If you are using a prime lens, then there is nothing to take care of for the focal-length. If you want fewer shots, then zoom out as much as possible. If you zoom in though, more shots will be required but the resulting panorama will have more resolution and can be printed larger. For web use, it rarely matters.

Focus should be set to make sure your subject is entirely in focus. If you are shooting a distant vista, then you can usually go to infinity. Otherwise, you can maximize focus by setting your lens to its hyperfocal distance. Once focus is set, switch to manual (MF) mode. There is usually a slider on the side of the lens or on the camera body next to the lens mount for that.

There are two ways to lock aperture, ISO and shutter-speed. One is to go to Manual mode and set each one yourself. As a general rule, you want a small aperture without going beyond the diffraction limit of your camera, so somewhere between F/11 and F/16 for a recent DSLR. ISO should be kept as low as possible, particularly is shooting from a tripod where camera shake is not an issue. Then, set the shutter-speed to get the right exposure. Take some test shots from the brightest area of your subjects to make sure nothing will be blown out.

The automatic way is to point the camera at the brightest area in the scene and press the AE-L button to lock exposure. Depending on your camera and how it is configured, you may have to hold that button the whole time or press it once before and once after all images for the panorama are taken.

White-balance is locked by any setting other than Automatic. Ideally, you should use Custom White-Balance which is available on all DSLRs. Kelvin or Preset WB work well too. Image parameters are generally locked except for certain automatic features like Adaptive D-Lighting (ADL) and Dynamic Range Optimizer (DRO) on Nikon and Sony DSLRs, respectively. If your camera supports these, use the menu system to turn them Off.

Once everything is locked as instructed here, your DSLR is ready to capture images for a panorama. Just make sure to keep the camera level and leave plenty of overlap between frames while doing so.

More information on how to create a panorama photo is found at Neopanoramic including panorama software and panoramic photography gear like heads, tripods and leveling bases.

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Here’s some information from the inviation:

PURPOSE: To assemble developing artists, editors, publishers, teachers, and professional photographers in order to celebrate and explore the future direction of photography.

WHAT TO EXPECT: LOOK3 is hosting an experimental two night event to present the work of 90 innovative photographers on a farm 30 minutes west of Charlottesville.  The 90 artists showing work were asked to participate by experts in this field such as PDN, Burn Magazine, Humble Arts, Getty Images, VII, and others.  This initiative, which we are calling LOOKbetween, is designed to showcase early-career talent and engage the presenting artists with media professionals on practices and trends influencing the direction of photography today.  We want to turn the traditional mentorship model on its head and let the established professionals hear what the next generation of photographers has to say.  Thank you to BD and National Geographic for supporting LOOKbetween. Each night will feature outdoor projections of work by the invited emerging photographers in attendance. Showcasing the work of these talented photographers is a main focus of the weekend. However, LOOKbetween is also designed to create networking opportunities and be a forum for the exchange of ideas between professionals and those early in their career. Saturday daytime will be devoted to discussion about important issues in photography.

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In addition to all the great imagery, Burn Magazine, Photocrati, and Luceo Images will all be announcing the winners of their grant competitions for emerging photographers. We’ll write a post about the event and the grant winners next week.

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The Photocrati Fund offers $5000 grants to non-professional photographers to undertake important humanitarian and environmental photography projects. Our goal is to identify outstanding, up-and-coming photographers and give them the resources necessary to pursue projects that will have a tangible and positive effect on the world.

We will offer one grant in 2010. The application deadline is March 15, 2010, and the award will be announced in June 2010. Awardees become Photocrati Fellows for the calendar year from the announcement of their award until the announcement of the following year’s award.

Award decisions will be made by the Photocrati Fund Board, a prestigious panel that includes some of the world’s best-known environmental and cultural photographers.

Check It Out:
Announcing $5000 Photocrati Fund Grants

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Contrasts: A dani man wears traditional body paint and decorations along with his sunglasses at the Baliem Festival.  Held every August in the Papuan highlands, the festival is a celebration of dani culture involving dances, competitions, and mock battles.

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In addition to Photocrati, I’ve been working on another great project with a great group of wedding photographers. Some of the best and best-known wedding photographers in the world are working together to launch a new, invitation-only membership group for wedding photographers called Best of Wedding Photography. This will be the most selective group of wedding photographers in the world.

Membership invitations are based on peer-review. We’ve created an independent board including Crash Taylor, David Beckstead, David Ziser, Anna Kuperberg, Glen Johnson, Ben Chrisman, and Matt Adcock / Sol Tamargo from Del Sol Photography. If you pay attention to the world of wedding photography, you should recognize many of these names. Beckstead and Chrisman have both been named as the WPJA’s Photographer of the Year in various years. Five of these member have been named among the Top Ten Wedding Photographers in the World by American Photo in various years. Johnson has a best selling book on wedding photography and David Ziser, of course, runs a well-known workshop series in the US.

We believe this organization will change the landscape of the wedding photography industry and become one of the most sought after invitations among wedding photographers worldwide. Look for the launch some time in November.

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I just wanted to let readers here know that Peter Burian (co-author of the National Geographic Photography Field Guide and author of many of the Magic Lantern DSLR guides) has just published a review of the Sony A850. That’s one newsworthy camera. It’s the most affordable full-frame digital SLR on the marketing now, yet offers the highest available resolution on the market at 24.6 megapixels. Compare that to the D3X, which offers the same resolution but costs about $5000 more.

In any case, Peter’s review is one of the first full field test of the A850 out there. There are a few others, and you can see some at TestFreak’s Sony A850 page. It’s clear that Sony has made some dramatic advancements in it’s offerings for digital SLR enthusiasts over the last year or two. It makes me wonder if and when it would ever be possible for manufacturers like Sony, Olympus, or Pentax to challenge the behemoths, Nikon and Canon, in the digital SLR market.

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“Small and compact, a good choice-if you don’t mind some compromises.

I’m not really sure that Canon knows exactly what to do with this camera. It seems simple enough, judging by weight and size, but is otherwise a complex tool with lots of oomph built in. If you’re looking to move up to a digital SLR without making a heavy investment or simply want an inexpensive and lightweight DSLR that you can tool around with on your next vacation, the Rebel T1i would be a good choice.

However, don’t buy this camera if you expect to use it extensively to shoot video-HD or otherwise, as you may be disappointed. Buy it as a still digital, and use the video capture as an adjunct feature to capture special moments when a camcorder isn’t handy….”

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Photocrati WordPress Theme

As you know I’ve been slowly (very slowly, sometimes) working on a series of reviews of website templates for photographers. This has given me a bit of insight into the advantages and disadvantages of various kinds of solutions.

Along with the team over at Photocrati, as well as a couple teams of web designers, I contributed that insight to help design a new series of WordPress themes for photographers. I think these are now one of the best low-cost solutions on the market (I’m biased, of course). I’m not going to write a full review of the themes, since it’s hard to objectively review a product you’ve helped design. But I do want to talk about what some of the advantages are, and, yes, some of the disadvantages. I’m going to structure this like my other reviews.

Let me start by saying that we’ve converted this site and I’ve converted my own phojournalism site to the new Photocrati WordPress themes. Check them out here:

WORDPRESS PHOTOGRAPHY THEMES | DEMOS

OVERALL APPEARANCE

In my view, these templates are beautiful. They have just the look I like, which is a simple, elegant look that emphasizes the images. The rest of the site just kind of fades into the background. They use primarily whites, grays, and blacks for the background, which for me is less distracting from the images than greens/reds/oranges or other bright colors.

Let’s start with a few screenshots of the themes. Here they are:

They have the look of many flash sites, even though they are not flash. The home page is designed with one large image space that contains a flash-style slide show.  The gallery pages contain rows and columns of thumbnails, which I prefer to “filmstrip” style thumbnails that require you to scroll up/down or side/side to see all the thumbnails in a gallery.

I actually like the gallery look enough that I actually use a gallery as my home page on my new photojournalism site. Below a screen shot of my new homepage. It also shows you want the galleries generally look like (although you can customize those like everything else.

Grade: A

EASE OF USE

I’ve often noted that there is an almost direct trade off between Ease of Use and Flexibility. Designers of templates can make thing easier by limiting the number of options you have, or they can give you lots of options, which will complicate things.

WordPress has lots of options. You can do almost anything with it. One downside of that is that WordPress themes are very much do it yourself solutions. You need to set up your own domain, your own hosting, and install WordPress. If you are familiar with all that, it’s really not too complicated. You can do it all in a few minutes at sites like <a href=”http://www.BlueHost.Com/track/erickdan” target=”_blank”>Bluehost</a> that offer one-click installation of WordPress.

Once you’ve got your blog and you’ve got to fill it out, and make many of the layout decisions yourself. Again, this is great for flexibility, but less so if you are looking for a plug-and-play-and-don’t-worry-about-it kind of site.

That said, pound for pound, WordPress is known to be one of the easiest web platforms to learn, giving you a tremendous amount of flexibility for a relatively short learning curve. And once you know WordPress, it IS easy.

Grade: B

FLEXIBILITY OF DESIGN

If these themes have a learning curve for WordPress newcomers, then the payoff is incredible flexibility. There really is very little you CAN’T do with a WordPress site. You can change colors, fonts, layout. Add elements or take them away. Move elements around. Add text where you want it. Integrate with social media. You can even add a full-fledged forum or e-commerce shopping center to your site if you want to.

The WordPress community is huge, and there are thousands of plug-ins that allow you to do just about anything.

Grade: A

BLOGGING CAPABILITY

WordPress is the world’s most powerful blogging platform. Not much more to say.

Grade: A

E-COMMERCE FUNCTIONALITY

I mentioned just a paragraph or two that there are all kinds of E-Commerce plugin-ins that allow you to add full shopping capability to WordPress. So the potential is there.

But for the time being, these these don’t offer what many of us want, which is the ability to sell photos directly from our galleries. The Photocrati team is working on this, but doing it in a way that is simple and elegant is tough work.

So for the time being, unless you are a WordPress guru who can do it yourself with one of the E-Commerce plugins, then you are out of luck until the Photocrati team comes up with an easy method to do it.

Grade: D

COST AND FEE STRUCTURE

Again, it doesn’t really get any better. Right now the Photocrati themes are selling for $59 each – for lifetime rights to the themes any updates. Pay once, low price, and it’s yours for life. Most highly managed template solutions (Photobiz/PhotoShelter/etc) entail ongoing monthly payments ranging from low to very high.

Grade: A

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Once again, WordPress is widely known to have about the best SEO capability that it’s possible to have. It has an inherent advantage over managed flash solutions, because it is a powerful blogging engine. And search engines love blog-style content – it fits all the qualities that search algorithms look for and therefore does very well. That’s while small mom-and-pop blogs can compete on the front page of Google with major multinational corporations.

Grade: A

FREE TRIALS AND GUARANTEES

Photocrati offers a 30-day money back guarantee that entails sending one email requesting a refund. Easy enough.

Grade: A

CONCLUSION

So, as you can see above, the Photocrati themes are strong in almost every aspect. They have two weaknesses: they do not yet offer the ability to sell your images directly from your site, and there is a learning curve for users who are new to WordPress. The second weakness, however, goes hand-in-hand with overwhelming flexibility. The reason there’s a learning curve is that, with WordPress, you are in control, and you can do just about anything.

As of now, pound for pound, I think these are best low-cost solution on the market, and it competes effectively with some highly managed solutions that cost 10-20 times more.

OVERALL GRADE: A-

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John Mitchell, who provides great tailored photo workshops in Australia.

Gregg Lowrimore, who does some great landscape and wildlife work in Colorado.

And to some businesses that support photographers and have supported DSLRBlog or Photocrati in various ways:

FrameFit.com, which has over 32 years of experience carrying picture frames, plexiglass, mat & foamboards, plus many other picture framing items.

Delmiaco Design Studio, which provides photoshop templates & digital backdrops that are professional, customizable, press ready.

Photogenic, one of America’s leading professional photographic lighting companies since 1904, specializing in electronic flash systems for professional and amateur image makers.

Photodex ProShow, software for making breathtaking photo & video slideshows for both DVD and web.

Profiles by Rick, whose custom ICC profiles provide a great, low-cost solution for photographers who want accurate color from their printers.

i2K Quickage Panorama Software for creating great panoramas, even with no tripod, on both Mac and Windows systems.

Diversified Lab – Pro Photo Lab, which has served professional photographers since 1977 with online proofs, printing, photofinishing, albums and more.

Denevi Digital Imaging Service, which provides High quality professional scanning and DVD transfer services, including Blu-ray for great prices.

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