It was something I have been wanting to do for a long time, but didn’t have the guts to do it.

By “location” I mean simply going out to the city streets with my model and photographing her out there. I was always thinking – “what other people would think?” or “what would they say?” or something like that. But since I actually want to make progress in my photography, I thought doing photo shoot like that was absolutely necessary.

So I took my camera, my lighting equipment, my model , and went out. Of course I didn’t just started wandering on the streets looking for nice places to be my locations. I noticed these locations beforehand while driving by, and thought that they would make a nice setting for a photo shoot.

On-location Photo Shoot, photo 1. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

My lighting equipment was very simple – one Canon EX430 flash on a stand with umbrella and one cheap Chinese flash unit. I also had gels and gobos.  The flashes were triggered remotely by wireless flash triggers.

During this photo shoot I had several problems from which I learned a lot, and now want to share with you.

• It was a night time and my model, Ira, was wearing a black coat.  It was pretty difficult to properly light the black coat in the dark. And though I planned that Ira would wear that coat during most of the shoot, eventually I had to give up and ask her to take it off. But! I also decided to use this lack of details to my advantage and tried to create compositions where it would add to the overall look instead of detracting from it.

On-location Photo Shoot, photo 2. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

• This one is more tricky one, so pay attention: As I said I was using cheap Chinese remote flash triggers. The thing with them that they only trigger the flash, nothing more than that, so you have to use flash in manual control. But this wasn’t a problem. The thing is that when you shoot a person on a dark background, for example  in a street at night, lit with street lights, and you want to light your person with a flash but you also want the background to be visible, you will have to use second curtain flash. This is a setting that you set in your camera, and I couldn’t do it because the remote flash triggers that I use do not support that. I found solution for this problem, but I am not fully satisfied with it: I put my camera on a tripod and first shot the background without the model exposing for the background. Then I started shooting Ira without moving my camera but having her adjusting her location so that she would be where I want her in the frame. And later in Photoshop I combined the foreground with the background.

On-location Photo Shoot, photo 3. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

• My additional problem was focusing in the dark. In one location it was really dark – the closest street light was pretty far away, so that I had trouble auto-focusing. I have a Canon and I heard that Nikon has better auto-focusing in the dark. But in my case I wish I had a headlight so I could light my scene with it enabling my camera to focus. Eventually I had to focus manually, but I learned from it and in the future I will always have a flash light with me when shooting after dark.

On-location Photo Shoot, photo 4. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

• And one last problem I would like to talk about was wind. I was lucky enough and the wind wasn’t strong, but if it would be just a little bit stronger, it would ruin my whole shoot. It is simple really – you have an umbrella on a light stand. Umbrella = sail. If wind blows into it, it will fall if the light stand doesn’t have counterweight. So always think about this when shooting outside and have something heavy to attach to the light stand.

On-location Photo Shoot, photo 5. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

This is it for now. I hope my experience will help you on your photographic journey, and as always any comments about this article or about my photos presented here are welcome.

Cheers,

Greg.

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I think that one of the most important aspects of photography is about joy of creation, expressing yourself and enjoying every minute of it. I always try to be creative, and though I don’t always get the desired results from my experiments I just continue trying. For me there is no other way. I try to put my heart and soul into my work mixed with feeling and emotions.

Today I’d like to share with you one of my attempts at creativity. It was a nice autumn weekend in Israel when me and Ira went to the Upper Galilee region to do a walking track near the Sea of Galilee. On our way back we stopped to visit the Greek Church of the 12 Apostles. This church always attracted me when I was driving by with its’ red roofs but I never had the chance to actually get inside.

This time we had about an hour, so we decided to finally give this church a closer look. I was so tired from our trip that I left my Canon DSLR in the car. I just didn’t have any mental mood for photography. But the closer we got to the church the stronger grew my desire to photograph it. Eventually I decided to photograph it with my iPhone.

This Greek church is very beautiful and is also located in a beautiful place. When we returned to our car I was surprised to find out that I took about fifty photographs of the church and its surroundings from variety of different sides and angles.

Another important aspect of photography (again, in my opinion) is to know how to choose your best photos, and to be brave enough to delete most of the rest. Otherwise you’ll end up with tons of photographs, which are very similar to each other (a tiny difference in a crop here, and in viewing angle there).

Thus on our way back (Ira drove the car) I went over all the photos of the Greek church that I took and deleted about 90% leaving only the ones I though were most successful. After that I started thinking – what would be the best way to present these photos in a way that would show the Greek Church of the 12 Apostles in all its beauty and also reveal some of the architectural details.

Eventually I decided to create a photo-collage of all the best photos. During the following months I was busy with other projects (including trip to Prague) and only recently got the time to put the idea of a photo-collage to test. It took me quite some time to do that as I had to change sizes, crops and other things in order to create what I had in mind.

Here is the collage of the Greek Church of the 12 Apostles. Remember that all the photos here were taken with my iPhone, and don’t judge the quality too harsh

And as always feel free to leave comments!

Cheers,

Greg.

Greek Church of the 12 Apostles. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Popularity: 5% [?]

At first this thought might sound crazy to you as it sure sounded to me, but then I thought that I could at least try to do that. Since my iPhone is always with me and my camera isn’t (due to circumstances beyond my control of course! ) it had already been more than a few occasions on which I really wanted to make a panoramic image but couldn’t.

So I decided to see if there are any apps for iPhone that can help me create panoramas. During my research I found several applications that  were created for this purpose. But after trying to use them I found out that most applications don’t do a good enough job – either the whole process was too time-consuming and difficult or the result wasn’t satisfying. And then I found application named AutoStich.

First of all I want to say that I am not affiliated with makers of this application in anyway, and I don’t receive any benefits if you decide to buy this application after reading this article. I am writing this only because I loved this app and want more people to enjoy it.

AutoStich really did the job so well that I was truly amazed at the results! And the process is also very simple. All you need to do is to take photos for panorama with your usual iPhone camera application. Just make sure that each photo overlaps with the next one at about 30 percent. Then you open the AutoStich application, simply choose the photos that you want to create panorama from, and let the application to do all the work.

After AutoStich finished, you will see the final image and also will be able to crop it as you wish. Then you can save it to your photos. There are several great things about AutoStich that I liked very much:

1. The panorama creation process is pretty fast and simple.

2. The result is very impressive – photos are stitched perfectly together, and if you made each shot correctly, the final result is just great!

3. The final panorama can be saved at the maximal resolution of the iPhone, what I mean is take for example 5 photos with your iPhone, stitch them together in AutoStich, and the final resolution that you’ll get will be 5 times bigger than single photo resolution.

4.You don’t have to use tripod or to be extreeemely careful! Just try to maintain the initial angle of shooting, and make sure that your photos overlap with each other. AutoStitch will do the rest.

I’d like to show you two of the panoramas that I created using AutoStitch. Please note that I reduced the resolution of these images in order to fit them here.

High Tech District in Tel Aviv. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Alonei Itzhak Nature Reserve. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

And now here is what welcome screen of AutoStich looks like, when you open the app in the iPhone:

In conclusion – AutoStitch is a great application for creating panoramas in your iPhone. It is cheap, simple to use, and delivers great results.

If this article was helpful to you, or you have additional thoughts on creating panoramic photos in iPhone, you are welcome to leave comments to this article or drop me an email to greg at photopathway dot com.

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