[Leica] A few Paris and Boston shots

[roark.paul at gmail.com (Paul Roark)]

Richard Man <richard at richardmanphoto.com> wrote:
> You do stitching AND multi-focus hand held?! Do you do at the same time
> often or never/rarely?

I do both often.  All were hand held in the Paris-Boston trip.  Tripod
works better, but the 35mm focal length stitches very well in PS.
That's one of many reasons I favor it in a one-lens outfit.

With respect to multi-focus shots, particularly if there is a simple
dual focus -- close and infinity -- one can shoot, move to the
infinity stop, and take the second shot very quickly without much
movement.

I've come up with a workflow to trace the outline of the close subject
with the eraser at about 12 pixels that makes the dual focus merging
much easier.  It's all manually done, but I do rely on PS's
Edit>Auto-align-layers.  There, if there is a major feature that
changed between frames it can be erased from the out of focus frame to
avoid it throwing off the alignment.

I've also found that the auto-ISO function, with the slowest speed
setting up to the max 1/125, works very well with the 35mm, but I
often check the histogram and move to manual if the scene is high
contrast.  Most, however, was simple point and shoot.  The rather
simple metering system works surprisingly well.

I might add that some of the dual focus shots were needed due to using
f/2.8 or f/4 in dark shots where the DOF would be shallow.

The ability to do "point and shoot" and then be able to print at 22x28
with what we would have considered "large format" quality in the past
is just amazing to me after years of carrying slow, heavy film
cameras.  Add available light evening street shooting, and this outfit
was really a fun one to carry around.  (I eagerly await a high quality
  80 - 100,000 ISO sensor in a future electronic view finder M!)

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com