Window on my Weekend

The theme for this week’s WordPress photo challenge is window.  I spent the weekend at the hockey rink.  My little hockey player had a series of out of town games, so three games in less than 24 hours.  If you play hockey you know that is a lot of ice time.  I watch and take photos from behind the glass.  It look a little while for it to occur to me that I could create a photo that would fit this challenge while I was at the rink.  So here is the scoreboard midway through the third game:

ISO 2500 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/320

Ouch, not a good game for the home team, we would end up winning 11-4, which is not a typical score in hockey.  My little hockey player’s team won all three games, which is nice, but the first two games were actually more interesting in terms of actual hockey and the scores were a bit closer.

This photo above is a panorama.  I created it out of three photos in Photoshop.  From where I was standing it was not possible to get the whole scoreboard in the frame. So, I shot three separate frames, making sure to have enough overlap so that Photoshop would be able to piece them together.  In Photoshop I went to File-Automate-Photomerge and just used the presets to create the image.  From there I cropped and straightened the photo.  Looking at it now, I think it could have used a white balance correction.

This is week two of the Weekly Photo Challenge for this year.  Last week I was reading the entry for “Beginning” by Cardinal Guzman, and he had created widgets to use that would allow a blogger to collect photo challenge posts all in one place.  The link I provided will take you to see his creations, one of which I am using in the right hand column of my blog. I would like to thank him for sharing and encourage you to visit his blog if you are interested.

So what do you think of my panorama? Are you a hockey fan?  If you have never seen a game I would encourage you to give it a try.  Check your local rink for a free game!

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Infinite

If you have ever been to a youth hockey game, or any other youth sport for that matter, you will already know that the possibilities for what might happen are pretty much infinite.  Infinite is the theme over at the photo challenge hosted by WordPress, so I thought I would use this image I have been working on to fit in with the theme:

Panorama of a hockey arena

This is a panorama that I created in Photoshop.  This is a very small version of it.  The full sized version is 42″ long and 9″ wide.  I’ll chat a bit about how I shot it and then how I created this final version.

First thing to know, I think, for any panorama, is that when you are shooting it, it is best to use a tripod or some flat surface.  The second thing is to remember that your software will need overlap in the photos in order to put them together.  The third thing is to take a lot of photos.  When I shot this, I shot it in three layers; the windows and benches, the ice, and then the ice and stands.  Even with all these photos, there were some gaps that I had to contend with later in the editing process.

To edit, I started with all my images in Photoshop’s Bridge program.  If you have Bridge, the workflow is this: Choose photos then Tools-Photoshop-Photomerge.  It will then give you a few options of what type of panorama you would like to create, in this case I am using the auto setting.

Then… well I’d like to tell you that a beautiful panorama appeared on my screen.  That would be a lie.  I had to reselect different photos, and try a couple different times before the photo that I had in mind appeared on my screen.  The different lines on the ice seemed to really confuse the program.  However, I did eventually get a good working copy.

It needed some work though.  In the original panorama, there were still some missing spaces.  Those turned up as just white.  Since I knew I was going to be creating another background, I selected all the white areas and made them orange.  In Photoshop I used the magic wand to select the white then did an edit-fill with the orange.  Why orange you might ask?  This arena that I shot is the home arena for a team whose colors are blue and orange.  When I tried blue in the white space, it made the image to dark, orange seemed to brighten it a bit.

Then I made a scan of a jersey of the home team.  That is the background that you see.  I edited and positioned the jersey, to make part of the logo appear to be on the ice.

Creating this image took quite a bit of time and experimenting.  I think though that simple panoramas of a scene can be easily put together.  There are many editing software programs that can help you with the actual editing, but the tips above on shooting the scene in the first place can apply to any scenario, regardless of your editing software.

So, what do you think of the panorama?  Do you shoot them yourself and have any tips? Do you have a blog post you would like to share of your own panorama work?  Feel free to leave your comments below.

Cheers!