Too Close? Unlock The Power Of Wildlife Panos!

[Music] hey everyone steve from backcountry gallery here and this time around i want to show you a cool trick for handling a situation where you're too close to an animal and you need a wider crop this is especially troublesome for prime shooters but even some zoom shooters can sometimes end up too close maybe the animal pops out of nowhere maybe it approaches closer than expected maybe your safari vehicle just gets too close it can happen for any number of reasons but being too close to an animal is almost as frustrating as being too far away although admittedly not nearly as common so how do you handle close range shots where you have just too much lens it's simple you do an on the fly wildlife panel shot in this video we'll look at field techniques and then how to put it all together afterward on the computer and it's actually way easier than you think the idea is the same as a regular panel shot you take images of different areas of the scene and then you combine it back home on the computer now normally this is reserved for things like landscape and macro work but if you're quick about it you can pull it off for wildlife too i know you may be skeptical and i'll admit it doesn't always work usually you know because the animal moves but still i'd rather try it than to forego the shot altogether first though a few rules obviously this is going to work better with stationary shots than it will for action work not that i haven't pulled an action shot off here and there with it but it's far easier and far more likely to work with stationary subjects however that doesn't mean the subject has to stay completely still either things like head turns or small body movements and such usually won't mess you up when they happen between shots however if the animal significantly changes body position or moves locations between shots even just a step or two you're going to have to start over you also have to make sure you stay in the same spot as you do this if you move like side to side or closer or farther from the animal between shots all bets are off as for field technique it's actually pretty simple first it's preferable to shoot in full manual mode so the exposure doesn't change as you pan from one part of the scene to the next however i also realize these kinds of shots usually are a surprise and if you do happen to be in auto exposure it's not like the end of the world or anything as long as you're shooting raw you can always even out the brightness back on the computer and i'll even show you a trick for that in the second part of this video where we do the post-processing for the shot itself i start by focusing on the eye and of course trying to get a good expression once i have that i simply pan left right up down whatever i need to get the rest of the animal i normally do this in just two shots but i have done it with up to six the trick is that you have to be quick the second you have that sharp eyeball slash good expression shot jump to the secondary shot or shots when you take the second shot or shots do not refocus if you refocus you'll likely end up with sharp and out of focus areas all kind of blending together in a really weird unnatural way in the final shot focus on the eye as much as you want but for the secondary shots never touch af so if you're using back button half simply release the af on button and then grab your next shot or shots if you're using shutter release af though you'll want to have a button set for af lock or you know preferably ae f lock just in case you're using auto exposure although again it's easy enough to adjust exposure later on in post you also have to exercise caution when you pan for the next shot make sure you're moving straight in the direction of the pan and not going off course for example if you're panning down make sure it's straight down and not like you know down into the left or down into the right or something otherwise you'll have a rough time back on the computer when you try to combine the shots a tripod or monopod really helps here and is the best way to go however you can pull it off handheld if you're really careful i know i have in the past as for the amount of overlap between shots again this isn't an exact sign since it's kind of done on the fly so i wouldn't worry about you know absolute precision here i usually try to have the secondary shots overlapping the first by like you know a third or half finally also consider the overall composition keeping in mind what the second shot will look like when you pan over to it in some cases you may have an animal that looks good in the first shot but when you pan for the second shot you realize you're cropping off part of its body when that happens people often adjust the second shot's composition to fit the animal but if you don't pan straight up down left or right and instead go at sort of an angle you end up missing part of the scene and you're going to need that later on so it pays to keep an eye out so that's the field techniques let's go to the computer let me show you some sample images and we'll put them together okay so here we are in lightroom and as you can see we have our first victim ready to be stitched right here but before we do that i do want to emphasize that this is not going to be like a complete course on how to stitch panos i'm just going to go over the typical stuff i do for wildlife photography just kind of get you started with the basics so speaking of that let's go ahead and get started with this little white face monkey as you can see he's kind of hanging over a branch here which is really really cute but unfortunately i was a little bit too close and i wasn't able to get the whole monkey in one shot however i was able to do a pano so i just kind of panned down and i grabbed his feet and a little bit of space underneath it and now we're going to put these two together it's actually really easy and by the way i'm going to show you how to do it obviously here in lightroom but keep in mind that most raw processors can do this kind of thing photoshop can certainly do this kind of thing so it's going to be a similar process no matter what you use so in lightroom we're going to go back to the grid view here and in this case i just have these two images to make it easy but you need to select the images that you want to stitch so in this case it's going to be this one here and this one here so i'm going to hold the command or control key down as i click it and i'll be able to select them both i'm going to go to the photo menu photo merge and just down to panorama and there we go we see a little preview there very quick very easy and there's no obvious errors here so i could just click merge at this point and be done with it however there are a few little options i do want to talk about first we have our three projection buttons spherical cylindrical or perspective most of the time for wildlife perspectives the one i end up using however i always check the other two just to kind of see if there's any benefit to them and in most of the cases there's not for this one here i definitely like perspective a little bit better but you know definitely check them out and see if any of these other projections work better for you next we have boundary wrap and basically what this does is it'll wrap the merge as it says here it'll wrap the merge result to fill the rectangular image boundaries preserving more image content so basically if you push it this way the image gets a little bit bigger so that's kind of cool but honestly the one i like the best here is the fill edges option so first before i do that let me turn off auto crop this is what we actually have for the stitch okay so when i went down i actually was not as straight as i should have been and you can see right here is the top image and underneath it is the bottom image and you can see how it was merged together there however that left some white spaces here so if we have autocrop turned on it just crops that away however we lose some image content when we do that so what i do is i turn that off and just click fill edges and that will fill in those edges for me and it looks much better so now we have pretty much a complete image ready to go and finally we have the auto settings option right here this doesn't really have anything to do with the merging process but this is just basically if you go into the develop module and click auto it'll auto automatically apply the you know color and tone corrections and things like that so if i turn it off you can see it gets a little bit flatter now when i click merge it will output this image as a dng that we can then go into the develop module and tweak to our liking so i'm going to click merge and the nice thing about having that as a dng is we are preserving the raw data so that we can actually really process this as a raw image once it's all said and done so that's a big advantage to being able to do the panos inside a lightroom and by the way most of the time this works i can actually make lightroom work i don't have to go into photoshop as you're going to see here in a moment with our next example but i'll let that finish up and now fast forward the video for you okay so here we go we have the final output image here and then i can go to the develop module and i can tweak this all i want i can looks like it could use a little more shadow adjustment maybe some highlight taming over here but for the most part it's pretty much ready to go and i can just process it the way i normally would output it and it's a done deal however not all images are quite this easy and sometimes you have to actually turn to photoshop let me show you that okay next we have this african fish eagle and i took the liberty of merging them together just to kind of show you how lightroom did it here but as you can see again way too close on this guy so let me show you what happened here though when i merged him together if you notice here we have this weird stick behind him that was going up his back and then it went over here and there's this big weird space here so the vegetation here doesn't quite look right to me so we're going to use this as an example of how to do a little bit better job than lightroom does and we're going to do it in photoshop and sometimes this is a pretty minor problem here but sometimes i've been in situations where i've tried to merge photos together and it was much more severe than this but the techniques are all pretty much the same so let me show you how to do this so i'm going to go back here and our first step is to match the brightness levels and make sure they match unfortunately as i said sometimes stuff happens by surprise and you want to be in manual mode but you happen to be in an auto exposure mode in this case i was manual with auto iso and what happened was i was at iso 400 here but then the camera moved it to 720 over here so this is roughly two-thirds of a stop brighter than this one and we don't want that we want them to be roughly the same brightness or it's going to be more difficult to work with in photoshop so if you can catch stuff like that here in lightroom your best bet is to fix it while you can so i'm going to fix this one right now it's at 7 20 i'm going to go to the develop module again two thirds of a step i'm just going to pull this down to like point 60 or something like that there we go and then go back to the library and now the brightness levels look much much closer it doesn't have to be perfect and we could you know technically you could still tweak this in photoshop if you had to but i find it's a little bit easier just to do it here in lightroom so as i said when we were outside you know if you do run into a problem with brightness it's pretty easy to fix if you're shooting raw so let's open these two up in photoshop from lightroom i can actually open these layers in photoshop so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to right click and edit in and then open as layers in photoshop so i have them both selected and we'll let it do its thing okay so here we are in photoshop with our fish eagle you can see we have our two layers right here and actually i want this layer the bottom layer i actually want on top so i'm gonna just move that up just preference on my part and then i'm going to turn that back off for just a second so we can see the shot but the first step here is to give ourselves a little more room to work so i'm going to zoom out a little bit and i'm going to go to the crop tool and i'm just going to expand the canvas i have no ratios or anything set in here if there is something to say clear and then you can pull and push this any direction you want i just need some more space to work with we'll do a final crop later there we go and i'm going to turn this back on make sure that layer is selected and then i'm going to go to the move tool up here i'm just going to drag that down and there's a couple of ways you can do this you can drop the opacity and you can kind of put it in see-through mode there and you can kind of line it up that way but another way to do this i put that back up there is to go to difference mode and this works pretty well i've been using this a little bit more lately i'm going to zoom in here and tell you how this works basically the way difference mode works is when you have pixels that are lining up between images they go dark on here so you can see it's you know getting darker the more together these pixels are as soon as i have everything as close to black as i can make it then i know that i have a nice good lineup of my images so trying to get that as close as i can that looks pretty darn good it doesn't have to be 100 perfect with these because we're going to smooth that kind of stuff over once you have that dialed in just go back to the blending mode and set it back to normal and there we go we have a decent line up here now we just need to smooth out these edges so our first step here is to drop a layer mask in here we do that by clicking this little button right here and that'll drop a layer mask and then we're going to grab our brush tool right here make sure we have black as our foreground color and that our opacity is set to 100 percent and we're going to make this brush a little bit larger and we can do that with our bracket keys i'm going to use the right hand bracket and i'm going to make that a little bit bigger because you want a nice soft brush to work with also just a quick side note i forgot to mention i noticed it as i was editing the video make sure that you click this menu and make sure hardness is set to zero again we want a nice soft brush here so hardness at zero and then we're just going to kind of brush along this edge and blend these two together and just kind of merge some of this stuff you can see how it's all kind of coming together here as i do that and i'm eliminating the one stalk as you can see here and just kind of bringing it down lower so it's not very noticeable and that looks much better there so no fancy cloning no messing around that was pretty easy to fix i'm going to kind of blend this over here a little bit more then i'm going to come over here and blend this area together here i'm not real worried about this out here and that's looking pretty good and i want to show you something else because we're going to have to do something with these feathers too because there should be a line there you can almost see you almost have to turn it on and off to see it but if you look right in this area where my mouse cursor is as i turn that on and off you can see there is a little bit of a line and all we have to do is just bring that nice soft brush in here maybe not quite that big this time i'm going to use a left bracket to make that smaller and i'm just going to go gently over that line and just blend these feathers together so it's nice and seamless there and there we go that's really all there is to it i'm going to look around here make sure that there's nothing else now you can see the bird moved a little bit or i moved because there's kind of a partial opacity thing there i'd probably hit it with the other brush so i'm just going to brush over this and get a little more detail in there and just kind of bring these guys together so that it's nice and seamless and that's all you do that soft brush does all the hard work for you just brush along those edges until they're nice and smooth and you can't really see where one image starts and the other one ends so i'm going to zoom back out and that's looking pretty good so far next i want to get a little bit more space in front of him and this is a trick i have in another video if you want to see the details of it make sure you watch that video i'll put a card above but i'm going to give you the crash course right here so first i'm going to crop this to about the size that i want maybe right about there i just want that a little i just want a little more space in front of his head there and what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a composite layer i got to start with that so that means i want to make sure this topmost layer is selected and turned on and i'm going to hit the command or control option or alt button again this all depends if you're windows or mac user shift and then the letter e and that'll make a composite layer of the layers below it then i want to take the rectangular marquee tool here and i'm just going to drop down here real close to his beak and just kind of go over this area here then i'm going to hit command or control t and that's going to turn on my transform tool right along that selection then i'm just going to drag this like so i'm going to stretch this out and give it a double click and just like that i've expanded this area and he has a place to look in this does not work with certain things but with vegetation it works real well like if you had a pole or something here obviously that would not work very well but with vegetation it works really really well and we're gonna do it again over here and again i'm just gonna make sure that rectangular marquee tool is in there and i'm going to make sure i don't catch any part of the bird here so i got to be careful that i'm probably going to start from the bottom this time and i'm going to go all the way to that edge just kind of go over it a little bit right so the selection is right into the blank area there and once again hit command or control t and we're going to just drag this this direction now you may have to hold shift down as you do it to make it go straight across like this so it's not acting like this it depends how you have photoshop set but you want it to go straight like that double click again command or control d to deselect and there you go and again i go over that slower and in more detail in the other video so if you want to learn that technique definitely check it out but as you can see we now have a final merged image of our fish eagle here that we can finish post-processing to our taste and just put it back in lightroom or you could just do it here in photoshop but that's the basic technique and those are the two primary techniques i use as far as merging photos together for wildlife work so there you have it again this technique doesn't always work but when it does it could turn a losing situation into a winter and by the way if you enjoyed this video be sure to check out my educational materials as well my youtube videos only represent a very tiny slice of the information in those publications each book and video workshop is absolutely loaded with practical field-proven tips and techniques that'll improve your images each and every time you're out check them out i know you'll be glad you did also make sure you sign up for the free email newsletter at my site so you never miss a video article or workshop opportunity or you know anything else that i'm doing at the time finally remember to like subscribe and get notified thank you so much for watching have a great day you

Channel: Steve Perry

Views: 14,845

Keywords: photography tips, photography help, Backcountry Gallery, Steve Perry, nature photography, wildlife photography, willdlife photography tips, too close, too much lens, too long lens, wildlife pano, wildlife panorama, stitching wildlife photos, heavy crop, tight crop, fixing a tight crop

Id: zaUuwFMR5VQ

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021