TR Forums

Woohoo. Shipped from GA Monday; should be here Wednesday! I wouldn't have thought it would have taken 2 days go the 359 miles down here. Come on, DHL. Help a brother out

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

At a friend of mine's wedding: http://usacomp.zapto.org/gallery/d/10536-1/IMG_1202.jpg

who married them? that kid behind doesnt look like a father or priest. is he even 18?!

He's the pastor @ their church.
I'll post some pictures with my new camera once I ge tsome time to get out and take some. I really like the new features, such as the ability to make certain colors more vivid.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

He's the pastor @ their church.

holy crap. pastors can be in their early 20s now? thats madness

So here some initial pictures with my new camera:

Default colors:

Vivid Blue:

Highlight blue, b/w all other colors:

Highlight orange, b/w all other colors:


Note, these are straight from the camera. No photoshopping at all

Those are very neat effects there, USAcomp. Go Gators!

I'd like to be able to apply those effects in post processing. Still, I'd liek to see some everyday shots with the highlighting effects on.

The Vivid Blue looks like all of the colors are vivid.

Every time I see Gator colors, I see Steve Spurrier and his moronic sunvisor in my mind's eye and my hands instinctivley reach out to wrap around his slimy neck.

I'll be out @ Lake Wauburg on Saturday, and I'll take my tripod and try to get some better shots to play with the settings.

Nice effects. Is that some HVAC ductwork? Might keep one's beer cool...or something.

I'd really like to get my wife a nice digital SLR for her birthday, but pretty much everything I've read suggests that unless you're a professional (or a bedroom pro), you are wasting your time and money.

Pagey wrote:

I'd really like to get my wife a nice digital SLR for her birthday, but pretty much everything I've read suggests that unless you're a professional (or a bedroom pro), you are wasting your time and money.

Digital SLRs are really for people who are so into photography that they already know (or are willing to learn) the ins and outs of aperture, ISO, shutter speed, etc., don't mind fiddling with tons of controls, and most importantly, love photography enough that they'll carry around a bulky, heavy object just to take pictures.

Consumer level cameras like USAcomp's A620 or my A95 are much better suited to casual shooting (or people who dont' have enough money to spend $1500 on an SLR setup). These cameras take awesome pictures, and even have some manual controls, but they are much smaller and easier to carry and use.

What's a bedroom? A pr0n director?

LOL, no, not a pr0n director. Though that might make home life more interesting. I guess by bedroom pro I mean someone that could do photography for a living/business but chooses not to due to other obligations.

Pagey wrote:

LOL, no, not a pr0n director. Though that might make home life more interesting. I guess by bedroom pro I mean some that could do photography for a living/business but chooses not to due to other obligations.

Take a peek at Sony's crossover product I am using, the R1. Big, heavy, but allows some great shots. Excellent resolution and handling. No changing lenses and comes with a great set of optics.

liquidsquid wrote:

Take a peek at Sony's crossover product I am using, the R1. Big, heavy, but allows some great shots. Excellent resolution and handling. No changing lenses and comes with a great set of optics.

And one of the few non-dSLRs with decent high-ISO performance. I was looking at that camera before I decided to buy my Olympus E-500; my many years of snapping pics with a Nikon N2000 (F301 for the Euros) kept me on the path of the SLR.

Looking around at the Egg I see a <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/CustRatingReview.asp?Item=N82E16830150065"> Sony DSC-H1 </a> but no R1. Am I crazy, or just looking in the wrong place? I wonder if the H1 would be a nice performer. We're on a tight budget right now.

Actually the H1 is a fantastic performer, probably the best bang for the buck out there right now. I have seen a lot of simply great pictures taken with it over at dpreview:

Check the forums (The R1 is on this site as well)
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1009

Honeoye Falls, NY, taken today (nothing special, I have to go back and try a better shot) But things to note: Sky is not blown. Details in branches. Wide angle lens allows for entire falls capture from this site, 24mm lens. Solar flars from water drops on the lens (grrr) This is scaled down by 4.3 of the original:



See my site below for R1 images (mostly test shots right now) I will get up some people shots soon. No time!

-LS

So here's some pictures from Lake Wauburg today. (have patience for pictures loading, and click for bigger picture)





Blue:

Green:


Me and the sister






The detail in this picture is scary!


Some baptisms:

LS: Nice pictures. One thing I notice from the R1 in your shots (checked your website out, too) is that they are very undersaturated. Is that the camera's default, or did you set it like that manually?

I'd like to see another pic of the falls, perhaps from a different time of day when the shadow isn't there.

Usacomp: I had the pleasure of coming down and canoeing on the Silver River recently. Your pictures brought me back. Canon A6xx's produce the sort of oversaturated, sharp photos I'm used to. Excellent framing work, too.

man i cant believe how close he got to that wasp taking that close up.

wasps are evil!!!! VERY - they chase u and sting u. then u die.

FireGryphon wrote:

LS: Nice pictures. One thing I notice from the R1 in your shots (checked your website out, too) is that they are very undersaturated. Is that the camera's default, or did you set it like that manually?

Hmm, they don't seem that way on my reasonaly calibrated monitors, however I do shoot images to truly represent what I see. Most cams over-saturate for appeal, but I really don't like that is it looks too much like a postcard. However you are getting a fair idea how blah this winter has been up here, not much to shoot around here that isn't either gray or brown.

In the RAW software Sony provides, you can switch between Standard/Real/Vivid color modes. Vivid being the one most P&S people use by default. I usually use Real (Adobe RGB).

See thjis for more info: http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/R1/R1IMATEST.HTM

I wanted to see if the differing color modes could be extracted from the RAW file, apparently so... here is the difference using sunlght WB.

Those three versions are pretty close. The vivid setting looks somewhat more saturated, but not much. Interesting.

Felt like doing a little photoshop touch-up on some old pictures tonight, so I figured I'd post something here.
Tree by a gorge in Hawaii, just twiddled with levels and saturation a tad.

As usual, click for bigger.

Pretty cool, the saturation suits the shot. Love the composition... though I am no expert there.

Its a shame the sky is all white though. Tough shot to get both the sky and landscape in the proper exposure. Many people will take a few shots at different exposures and blend them in PS. For example one shot with the sky exposed properly, the other with the foreground. Otherwise use a camera with a wide dynamic range like a lot of the latest higher-end prosumers have.

I am dying to get out there with my R1 and take some real shots but I can't seem to get the frig out of this house! Something keeps coming up.

-LS

liquidsquid wrote:

Pretty cool, the saturation suits the shot. Love the composition... though I am no expert there.

Its a shame the sky is all white though. Tough shot to get both the sky and landscape in the proper exposure. Many people will take a few shots at different exposures and blend them in PS. For example one shot with the sky exposed properly, the other with the foreground. Otherwise use a camera with a wide dynamic range like a lot of the latest higher-end prosumers have.

I am dying to get out there with my R1 and take some real shots but I can't seem to get the frig out of this house! Something keeps coming up.

-LS

Yeah, CS2 has an "automatic" HDR combiner that should help in combining multiple frames for landscapes like that, tough to do without a tripod handy though. In all honesty I thought the shot was a throwaway for a while - the original is just way too hazy and unsaturated to be especially pleasing. I like the added punch from taking the saturation a tad over the top, and without that boost the background suffers greatly. I could mess with selectively boosting the saturation of the background, but the saturated foreground is rather striking. I love gnarled trees like that.

I love that shot there. Very well done on the PS'ing as well. One day I hope to actually know what I'm doing in such a program *sigh*

From a Canon SD 500

Full rez
Here
A movie clip from the same camera (15MB) Here

I put that pipe in there to see if it would get hot enough to melt the pipe some what, but it didn't

Hi! Some pictures from my Christmas in Cornwall.

Its from my little 3.2m compact, not my SLR as I can afford to go digital just yet. Anyways... I carry my compact around and see if I can get some good shots. The only manual adjustment is +/- exposure!

1: Along the beach... dialled in -1 stop to try and make for a decent shot.



2:My girlfriend, Dad, and I!


3: Tight crop of the Cathedral in Truro. -1/3 stop.


4: Walking along tin tangle castle, saw the sun setting. Snapped it. -1 1/3 stops.

mattsteg: I bet if you increased the shutter speed and closed the aperture on those shots, the sky wouldn't be as blown out as it is. That would make the rest of the picture dark, but it's remarkably easy to brighten a darker image and still have it looks nice. I take almost all of my outdoor pictures this way because my Canon A95 doesn't have great dynamic range.

duplo: Those are awesome shots!

2 is excellent. 3 is nice, but building pics like that are a bit overdone. 1 & 4 are competing shots, and 1 is the superior one, imho. Excellent work, thanks for sharing.

FireGryphon wrote:

mattsteg: I bet if you increased the shutter speed and closed the aperture on those shots, the sky wouldn't be as blown out as it is. That would make the rest of the picture dark, but it's remarkably easy to brighten a darker image and still have it looks nice. I take almost all of my outdoor pictures this way because my Canon A95 doesn't have great dynamic range.

In retrospective I should have exposed a bit less, but at the time I was just letting the camera meter for itself, and it isn't very protective of highlights as we can all see right now. It certainly tends towards overexposing a bit in that sort of situation. Looking through all of my photos from that trip most of them are overexposed a tad. I only had ~500 clicks with the camera previous to that trip, and most of those were either indoors, in dark or overcast conditions, or had larger portions of sky that the camera metered more correctly. I also probably wasn't paying enough attention to not overexposing the sky as well. My camera is a Canon a80 so I'm sure the limitations on dynamic range are similar. I'd like to get something superior because the shots I really enjoy taking tend to be a tad on the challenging side. While the photographer, not the camera, makes the shot, nicer tools sure are tempting.

duplo: awesome shots.

They're probably very similar. A good trick with auto settings is to point straight up at the sky, press the shutter halfway to lock the auto metering, then reframe and shoot. You can meter a darker portion of the sky or straight into the sun, too, for different metering.

I find that nearly all of my purposefully-underexposed photos are very easy to edit. Due to the nature of the PowerShot sensors, the resulting edit can be more accurate to what the scene was in real life than trying to expose it properly on the spot. In the year and change that I've had my A95 I've taken well over 20,000 photos with it (yes, the IMG_#### filenames cycled twice) and I've found this to be most effective at properly capturing scenes.

Underexposing works best outdoors where there's light to spare and contrast is less even i.e. on a sunny day (contrast is easily normalized during post-processing). Indoors, or in cloudy conditions, it's much more difficult to shoot this way. If you use a flash, it's not necessary, but if you're forced to shoot indoors without a flash, environment lighting is more important.

This stuff applies to the handful of PowerShots I've gotten to use in the last three or four years. I've also had the luxury of shooting with a 20D on a few occassions. It was a remarkable feeling, being able to shoot practically straight into the sun without having to worry about blown highlights or any other shortcomings present in the lesser PowerShots that need to be accounted for.

FireGryphon wrote:

They're probably very similar. A good trick with auto settings is to point straight up at the sky, press the shutter halfway to lock the auto metering, then reframe and shoot. You can meter a darker portion of the sky or straight into the sun, too, for different metering.

Nice idea.

FireGryphon wrote:

I find that nearly all of my purposefully-underexposed photos are very easy to edit. Due to the nature of the PowerShot sensors, the resulting edit can be more accurate to what the scene was in real life than trying to expose it properly on the spot. In the year and change that I've had my A95 I've taken well over 20,000 photos with it (yes, the IMG_#### filenames cycled twice) and I've found this to be most effective at properly capturing scenes.

Good call. Heck, even just blindly auto-adjusting the levels would probably do pretty well.

FireGryphon wrote:

This stuff applies to the handful of PowerShots I've gotten to use in the last three or four years. I've also had the luxury of shooting with a 20D on a few occassions. It was a remarkable feeling, being able to shoot practically straight into the sun without having to worry about blown highlights or any other shortcomings present in the lesser PowerShots that need to be accounted for.

That sort of capability sure sings a heck of a siren song.