Last guest post from the Vienna series by Peter Schlossnikel:

The final short in this mini series is a long time exposure of Vienna’s skyline. This photo works really nice with the tilt-shift effect, since the scene has a good amount of depth and mix of objects at different distances.

See the original shot for comparison:

It was shot from a dormitory called Panorama in the 20th Bezirk in Vienna. Camera was located on a public balcony on the highest floor of the building.

Here’s the technical data of the shot: Exposure 30,0 sec at f / 17 – Focal Length 17 mm – ISO 100 –Canon EOS 5D Mark III – Lens EF17-40mm f/4L USM

Also check out the kick-ass design work Peter does for his own company at petriografie.de. I had the honor to work with him on fabulous Boinx Software products like iStopMotion (Mac and iPad), BoinxTV and others since 2007. We had great fun along the way. In 2010 we started our little side (ad-)venture called The Munich Appsters, which — after some major bumps along the road — is just back with MetroCities 1.5 on iPhone. Amongst others, Peter also works with Marco Pifferi on AroundMe and the recently released Reminder+. Contact him directly for more info.

Another guest post by my friend Peter Schlossnikel:

The second photo is in the Vienna series is a reflection of the famous Karlskirche. Again with some quick and simple adjustments more contrast, vignette and vibrance was added.

Here’s the original shot for comparison:

Technical data: Exposure 1/1600 sec at f / 3,2 – Focal Length 46 mm – ISO 1250 – Canon EOS 5D Mark III – EF24-70mm f/2,8L USM

To be continued…

You also might want to check out Peter’s Instagram feed for lots of inspiring on-the-go iPhone shots. What I love most about Peter’s shots is that he goes way beyond using the default Instagram filters and has this unique ability to compose rather ordinary scenes into pieces of art.

Guest post by Peter Schlossnikel:

When playing around with the TiltShift app for the first time I immediately wanted to discover its capabilities to enhance photos that are not exactly typical tilt-shift subjects. I always love to try plugins or filter presets in a non-typical way and thereby discover new inspiring effects and ways of image processing.

Living in Vienna last year I chose three completely different images I shot in this beautiful city to play around in TiltShift.

I took the first photo at Alberner Hafen, which is an old abandoned dock and a great shooting location. With TiltShift it was really easy to set some depth of field and add contrast and color to the photo.

For comparison, here’s the original photo before processing in TiltShift:

A few technical details:
Exposure 1/500 sec at f / 8,0 – Focal Length 40 mm – ISO 100 – Canon EOS 20D – Lens EF17-40mm f/4L USM

You can find more of my photos on my Flickr stream.

Series to be continued…

After a very long wait, TiltShift 1.3 is finally available! Check out the previous post to learn more. Open the App Store app on your Mac and click on “Updates” to update to the latest version.

Here’s what’s new in this version:

• Fullscreen View. Use View > Enter Fullscreen or the fullscreen widget (⤢) common to many (Mountain) Lion apps to entirely focus on your photo and use as much screen space as possible for that task.
• Visual refresh, chapter I. TiltShift now overall wastes less screen space, most prominently on the bottom of the window and looks a lot cleaner and nicer.
• Important bug fixes related to Close and Save As. TiltShift should no longer break under any circumstances.
• More small fixes. As usual, a few minor things here and there.

What would you like to see next? Use the contact menu above to tell me! If you experience problems, please also contact me before writing a negative review on the App Store.

One more thing: a few users run into a problem where the processed photo looks distorted or otherwise not as expected. The preview inside TiltShift is just fine. This seems to be related to a problem with the graphics processor on the Mac and I haven’t yet found a pattern that would allow me to prevent that situation. If you run into that issue, please open TiltShift Preferences (TiltShift > Preferences…) and turn on the option “Enable Software Renderer” at the bottom. If that doesn’t help, please get in touch!

Option for Software Renderer in TiltShift Preferences.