First Cut from Ireland

This is my first post from my photography trip to Ireland, with Peter Cox (https://www.petercox.ie/), who I can not recommend enough: knowledge + skill + humour. It was also my first trip to Ireland! We were there for 10 days and I was blessed with a great crowd: all Americans plus one Australian.

I intend to write about my Irish photography experiences in a few posts over the coming months. Today’s story is about how my 24mm TSE performed with the Rogeti TSE frame. The what I hear you say!

The TSE is a great landscape lens as it allows me to shift 12mm away from the base image, thus instead of taking an image at 24x36mm, I can take one with a ‘pseudo sensor’ size of, say, 48x36mm or 24x50mm. In addition, the quality of the glass in the TSE is high. 

But, of course, if I fix my camera on the tripod and shift the lens, I change perspective. That’s where the TSE Frame comes in, as the lens is fixed to the tripod and when I shift, the camera moves, not the lens.

Here is a picture of the TSE Frame with the 24mm TSE lens and you can read about it here: http://www.rogeti.com/en/tseframe/

Having established my composition I used Magic Lantern via the LCD.

Focusing was assisted by my Magic Lantern Focus Bar Lua script, but I also zoomed x10 to confirm focus, using my Swivi S5 LCD Loupe, as using the LCD in bright conditions is a challenge.

As for exposure, I shifted to the sky frame and used the Magic Lantern Raw ETTR functionality, to nail the highlights. I had already decided to use Dual-ISO to gain nearly 3Ev lift in the shadows: thus there was no need to exposure bracket for this scene.

For those that are not used to Dual-ISO ETTRed images; here are the three RAW captures after I shifted 12mm up and down from the base image.

And to illustrate the extreme ETTR nature of the sky image: here is the Lightroom histogram of the sky image above:

After ingesting into Lightroom, the first task was to ‘develop’ the Dual-ISO RAWs, arriving at these new RAW DNGs: each Auto Toned here to illustrate the final capture detail.

Once again to illustrate the Dual-ISO ETTRed 'development', here is the histogram of the sky shot, showing zero blown out pixels, thanks to ML.

It was then a simple matter of post processing in Lightroom. First, stitching with the LR pano feature; then completing the ‘final’ (for now) edit in Lightroom, giving this final, 5414x6767 209MB TIFF image. 

In future posts I'll explore other images from my trip to Ireland and further post processing in Photoshop.