Sounds great, and from what I had seen of it online I don't have any doubt I'll love it and spend countless hours in it down the line!
However I was just wondering if we still had the option of Photo Travel mode, but it isn't so, right?
Photo Travel mode is essentially replaced by Scapes. However, in a sense, you can
think of it as a kind of Travel mode.
Many of the locations have quite a few Scapes, so when you look at that set of Scapes (e.g. Devil's Causeway) , it's a bit like a Travel Mode with, say, half a dozen or so predefined camera spots at each location. Ever been to one of those famous locations for getting
the perfect shot and there are literally tripod marks on the ground? In Scapes, you get to use the experts' tripod holes. From those points, you can zoom in, pan, rotate, change shutter speed, three focusing options including one locked on an object. Then there's a boatload of "effects", including a thing like Photoshop's Layer Masking function. These can be used in combinations with user-defined % strengths.
You can search for Scapes under a wide range of quite detailed criteria. Geography, time of day, city vs coast, race track, too numerous to cover. The search facility is a welcome tool.
And here's probably the biggest, and most welcome surprise. You can select a saved Scape photo and be taken back from that photo to the exact Scape, with your camera framed the exact same way, same focal length, f-stop, shutter speed, same placement of cars, same post processing effects. Everything set up exactly as you had it when you pressed the shutter button! This is awesome!! It's a giant leap beyond Photo Travel. If I get a good setup in Photo Travel, I can never reconstruct exactly what I did.
So in a year's time, when someone asks "how did you do that?", you can provide an exact answer. And if you decide that it could be improved upon by a slight reframing, nudge that car a touch, intensify the contrast, add a wee bit of desaturation of the background, etc, you can do it, saving as many new versions as you like.
Here's an example, a simple one. I was looking at what others have done with Scapes, and found one I really liked. Simple desert scene, beautiful light, just gorgeous. Except the framing was a little "off". The back of the car was cropped off. Not as though it was intentional, just an accident. Had I known about this function, and this was my photo, I could have fixed it in seconds. It may even be possible to download his Scape photo and work on it on my PS4.
Imagine this capability in the real world. You travel and take many photos. A year later, you'd like to go back to that same spot and take almost exactly the same photo, just with a slightly wider angle lens. Same time of day, season, weather etc. Same people and cars. Same puddles. Maybe with the highlights not so hot. Done!
