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ludi
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 14, 2013 11:19 am

JustAnEngineer wrote:
It's a red oak because the wood is red.

Yup. You can buy the stuff all day long at Home Depot in the pre-cut and lumber-by-the-foot section because it's a relatively cheap and widely available grade of oak. It's about the same hue as redwood pine lumber.

Anyway, try a macro shot where you can see just a section of that same leaf, and count all the veins. Tripod work is helpful but sometimes just getting lucky with a handheld and good light can do the trick. Using the Canon EF-S 60mm macro, I hand-held a shot of a dime-sized flower at a distance that filled the frame, and then got a pretty decent 9x12 print out of it.
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TheEmrys
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Fri May 17, 2013 4:18 pm

I was sitting by my baby last night when my dog got really interested in something outside. We've got a lot of foxes and squirrels, so I figured I'd take a look. I didn't change anything, but used ISO100 at about 8pm, so light was definately not ideal. However, I had on my new (to me) Minolta 135mm/2.8 and I'm pleased with the light capture. Here is what captivated my dog:

Image
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lonleyppl
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Fri May 17, 2013 11:55 pm

Image
Image
Image

All from White Oak Canyon in Shenandoah National Park. Everything was hand held, which made the soft water effect a bit difficult.
Image

Panorama from Old Rag Mountain. Absolutely incredible hike. This wasn't the best viewpoint, but it was the panorama that turned out best. I used Hugin to stitch together multiple images, and I had to rush through taking some images, so they didn't turn out well.
My favorite vista on the mountain didn't work for a panorama as I was almost blown off as I took the photo. There was a storm coming in, and at least a 20ft drop on the majority of the perimeter of where I was standing.
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Darkmage
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Sat May 18, 2013 11:26 am

lonleyppl wrote:
Panorama from Old Rag Mountain. Absolutely incredible hike.
Huh. I didn't realize you were nearby. You're right about that hike, it's a lot of fun. Great photos!
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flip-mode
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Sun May 19, 2013 5:38 pm

Wow, Emrys, and Lonelyppl, great pictures!
 
lonleyppl
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Sun May 19, 2013 8:29 pm

Darkmage wrote:
Huh. I didn't realize you were nearby. You're right about that hike, it's a lot of fun. Great photos!

It was about an hour drive. Definitely worth it. I did the 7 mile loop (9-ish if you include the trek from parking lot to trail head) in 4 hours, with several deviations and a lot of photos. I was rushing a bit due to the incoming rain.

flip-mode wrote:
Wow, Emrys, and Lonelyppl, great pictures!


Thanks! I was really happy with how some of the panoramas and some of the water ones turned out. I didn't think they would come out that well since I left my tripod in the car.
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PenGun
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Sun May 19, 2013 9:54 pm

Just got back from a small trek into the bush above Cathedral Grove near here. From the camera, have not had time to fool with them yet:

Image

Image

Fairly pleased, but I still need to work on this wide lens stuff.
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flip-mode
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Mon May 20, 2013 7:55 am

PenGun wrote:
From the camera, have not had time to fool with them yet:

I am interested in seeing the before/after results of any corrections you make.
 
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Mon May 20, 2013 1:20 pm

flip-mode wrote:
PenGun wrote:
From the camera, have not had time to fool with them yet:

I am interested in seeing the before/after results of any corrections you make.

There is this although I am not really happy with it yet:

Image
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flip-mode
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Mon May 20, 2013 2:27 pm

Without knowing what you did at all, it looks like you manipulated the perceived focal length (or did you just crop?). Also, the bark on the big tree used to be brown and is now nearly all green. All the browns of the original are nearly lost. Browns are undesirable? I can see the allure of the manipulated image - it just about glows.

Everyone here seems pretty enthusiastic about post-processing, but part of me is strongly drawn to the ideal of accepting the image just the way it comes out of the camera, unless there are extenuating circumstances.

PenGun, I appreciate your sharing of the before and after and I don't intend to be critical, rather just conversational.
 
Airmantharp
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Mon May 20, 2013 2:45 pm

flip-mode wrote:
Without knowing what you did at all, it looks like you manipulated the perceived focal length (or did you just crop?). Also, the bark on the big tree used to be brown and is now nearly all green. All the browns of the original are nearly lost. Browns are undesirable? I can see the allure of the manipulated image - it just about glows.

Everyone here seems pretty enthusiastic about post-processing, but part of me is strongly drawn to the ideal of accepting the image just the way it comes out of the camera, unless there are extenuating circumstances.


Here's the fun thing about that- there's no such thing as a 'non-processed' shot. Either you're accepting the camera's processing with whatever settings the camera is using, or you're taking the RAW dump and using a program to 'process' it. Either way, some interpretation is going on, and both allow user input.

Using an application to adjust how an image is processed may even be necessary in order to get it back to what the original scene looked like; cameras still make mistakes! But crucially, skillful post-processing allows you to focus the emphasis on the shot where you want it. You can quickly and easily bring out details that would otherwise be lost in shadows or highlights along with adjusting individual colors and tones.
 
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Mon May 20, 2013 3:09 pm

I did crop some from the image. I still can't get close enough with the 14mm but I am getting better.

The original image was actually taken using the wrong film emulation. The first one is the JPG from the camera and it is emulating Provia which is not really what I wanted in that situation. I take a JPG and RAW image each time so the second image is from the RAW file and I 'developed' it using Velvia as my colour target as I love the older Fuji 50 films for that kind of stuff. There is some mild masking too but I'm not sure if I like it much. It is probably better than the original but ... well I'm not finished with that one. It's a very complicated image.

This is much simpler and although I will revisit it, I think I can get more from the whitest part, I am happier with this for now:

Image
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flip-mode
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Mon May 20, 2013 3:12 pm

Airmantharp wrote:
Here's the fun thing about that- there's no such thing as a 'non-processed' shot. Either you're accepting the camera's processing with whatever settings the camera is using, or you're taking the RAW dump and using a program to 'process' it. Either way, some interpretation is going on, and both allow user input.
I understand what you're saying, and I may eventually be convinced of it. I supposed film photographers did much the same thing with film developing techniques - maybe film was inherently even less-so "straight from the camera". Wait, am I talking myself over to your viewpoint? I'm not going to do your work for you! :lol:
 
Airmantharp
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Mon May 20, 2013 8:50 pm

flip-mode wrote:
I understand what you're saying, and I may eventually be convinced of it. I supposed film photographers did much the same thing with film developing techniques - maybe film was inherently even less-so "straight from the camera". Wait, am I talking myself over to your viewpoint? I'm not going to do your work for you! :lol:


You don't have to do much- if you've composed and exposed your shot the way you want it, then generally all you'll be doing is bringing detail out in the highlights and shadows. And there's amazing amounts of detail hiding there!

For highlights, you're either reducing the impact that bright light sources or reflections have, which can improve composition, or in the case of a bright sky, you're bringing out cloud detail as well. For shadows, well, what you can't see and don't know to look for in the OOC shots will amaze you and add value to the shot. You won't be able to live without it :).

And the Lightroom link above is for the Beta, which for basic editing is fully-featured, and free till the end of June. It's worth checking out and taking the time to wrap your head around, even if you don't do anything special with your shots; the management functions become invaluable as well.
 
flip-mode
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Mon May 20, 2013 8:53 pm

Dell is selling Corel Aftershot Pro for $25. The program is supposedly a pretty good Lightroom competitor.
 
Airmantharp
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Mon May 20, 2013 9:18 pm

flip-mode wrote:
Dell is selling Corel Aftershot Pro for $25. The program is supposedly a pretty good Lightroom competitor.


The one feature I see missing is lens/body profiles; being able to correct for lens distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration as well as accounting for nuances in different camera bodies as well as using lenses on different crop factor bodies makes a difference. Lightroom just does this stuff with the tick of a check box :). Also, did I mention the Beta is free for the next month... It's non-destructive, so you can play all you want without making changes to your RAWs.
 
flip-mode
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 10:39 am

Here is another picture I took that I think would be excellent were it not for the too-bright sky:

Image
 
Bashiba
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 10:46 am

Image
This was done using 3 exposure HDR and in a 3 section pano, so 9 total exposures. The HDR makes the color a bit more vivid, but its actually not far off of what it looked liked that day, it was taken Sunday Afternoon while a storm was building that would lead to a tornado touching down just a few miles from where it was taken. I just thought the colors of the field where particularly unusual with the overcast.
 
Airmantharp
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 12:00 pm

Image

It needs some selective editing, but some quick global editing brought out detail in the sky and reduced the impact of the highlights on the building. What do you think?
 
flip-mode
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 12:16 pm

Nice work. You pulled out some much better colors. Can this kind of work be done in Photoshop CS 5.5? (I have that.)
 
Airmantharp
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 12:32 pm

flip-mode wrote:
Nice work. You pulled out some much better colors. Can this kind of work be done in Photoshop CS 5.5? (I have that.)


Depending on your skill with PS, you could do much better, yes :).
 
flip-mode
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 12:49 pm

Airmantharp wrote:
Depending on your skill with PS, you could do much better, yes :).
There is much to learn...

So, given the ability to manipulate the RAW image data, a question comes to mind: why bother taking multiple exposures rather than taking one RAW file and manipulation the exposure of the RAW file, save as multiple images, and then HDR merge with those saved images?

Also, it seems CS 5.5 does not like Windows 8 much. :-? But that's for another thread...
 
Airmantharp
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 12:59 pm

If your shot is fairly well exposed, you should be able to reasonably pull up the shadows and pull down the highlights to balance the detail across the shot- shooting in RAW improves this by preserving all of the dynamic range that the sensor captures (as opposed to the clipped/compressed range of JPEGs).
 
PenGun
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 1:10 pm

flip-mode wrote:
Airmantharp wrote:
Depending on your skill with PS, you could do much better, yes :).
There is much to learn...

So, given the ability to manipulate the RAW image data, a question comes to mind: why bother taking multiple exposures rather than taking one RAW file and manipulation the exposure of the RAW file, save as multiple images, and then HDR merge with those saved images?

Also, it seems CS 5.5 does not like Windows 8 much. :-? But that's for another thread...


I doubt CS2 will like W8 either. For image manipulation you really don't need anything more than CS2 but if you have issues so be it.

Any photograph, no matter how it is achieved, is just an approximation of what you saw when you made the exposure. As Ansel Adams said:

"The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways."

This is true. You will have to manipulate the image to reflect what you actually saw when you made the shot. The camera will just do what it can.
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Airmantharp
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 2:14 pm

I look at that shot again, now with an SPVA monitor at work instead of my 1366x768 TN laptop screen, and I see tons of artifacting. Looks like the RAW would be needed, as that JPEG has already thrown out all of the highlight data.
 
flip-mode
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 4:23 pm

Airmantharp wrote:
I look at that shot again, now with an SPVA monitor at work instead of my 1366x768 TN laptop screen, and I see tons of artifacting. Looks like the RAW would be needed, as that JPEG has already thrown out all of the highlight data.


That's OK. The picture can be retaken (really need wider than 18mm to get the shot I want). It's improving the skill set that is the big goal.
 
Airmantharp
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 4:32 pm

flip-mode wrote:
Airmantharp wrote:
I look at that shot again, now with an SPVA monitor at work instead of my 1366x768 TN laptop screen, and I see tons of artifacting. Looks like the RAW would be needed, as that JPEG has already thrown out all of the highlight data.


That's OK. The picture can be retaken (really need wider than 18mm to get the shot I want). It's improving the skill set that is the big goal.


If you can use the histogram in the camera to get an idea of where your shadows and highlights stand, that may help. Upon in-camera review, if you see peaks 'squished' significantly to the left (sunken shadows) or right (blown highlights), then you have a bases for retaking the shot on the spot with different exposure settings.

When shooting at a car show over the weekend (some shots on my Flikr), I found that the camera's decided exposure left the image far, far too over-exposed. As I was shooting in manual (hooray!), I simply changed the exposure settings so that the camera read the shot as -1 or -2 EV (on the meter shown in the viewfinder). Typically this meant a faster shutter speed, but in bright daylight I found myself setting a narrower aperture even on my F/4 zoom; I was already at 1/4000 and ISO100, and couldn't get any darker without cheating!

*By cheating, I mean setting exposure compensation, which I believe would have the same basic effect that the Exposure slider has in photo applications, and would be limiting the dynamic range in the shot. I'd only allow this if I needed the focus isolation that a wider aperture provides, but I'd do it knowing that I'm likely sacrificing some flexibility in post.
 
flip-mode
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 6:14 pm

Yeah, I "liked" or marked or upvoted (or whatever-ed) one of those shots on your Flickr. It's a great shot that seems like it should be the lead image for an article or something. And whoever that woman is - no offense if she's your gal - is making those jeans look good.

As for the rest of the stuff you said, it's over my head at the moment. I've spend the last 30 minutes smacking my brains with Photoshop. Masks are confusing for a beginner.
 
Airmantharp
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 6:37 pm

flip-mode wrote:
Yeah, I "liked" or marked or upvoted (or whatever-ed) one of those shots on your Flickr. It's a great shot that seems like it should be the lead image for an article or something. And whoever that woman is - no offense if she's your gal - is making those jeans look good.

As for the rest of the stuff you said, it's over my head at the moment. I've spend the last 30 minutes smacking my brains with Photoshop. Masks are confusing for a beginner.


No relation to the 'woman making jeans look good,' and I can make out a giant rock on her left hand, so I'll refrain from further observations :).

If I spent 30 minutes in Photoshop, 'smacking my brains' is also all I'd be doing. My observation of Photoshop is that however you think Photoshop may work, you think wrong. I even took a class that went over it, and I'm still fairly lost. It's like having a mechanic's entire toolbox available for an oil change. You only need two tools, but you don't know which two and you don't know where they are or what they look like!

So here's my 5th (I think) Lightroom plug in this thread- THE BETA IS FREE. Photoshop is more than capable of doing the editing you want, but Lightroom is designed to do it immediately, and intuitively, while doing everything else you need between inserting the flash card into a reader and viewing the finished photos on the web or in prints. And it does it all well. AND it will shuffle stuff to external editors like Photoshop without complaint!


:lol:
 
flip-mode
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Re: General photography thread [img heavy]

Tue May 21, 2013 7:44 pm

I hear you man. It's just:

  • have photoshop
  • want fisheye
  • want circular polarizer
  • telephoto would be nice
  • driver side window is nonfunctional
  • Haswell / USB 3 / DDR 3
  • tripod is old and busted
  • clothes from the 90s
  • possible trip to Germany in August
  • wife
  • underpaid
  • I like good beer

I believe Lightroom is 100% as good as you say it is. I would love to get Lightroom right now: add to cart; checkout. I'd put it before a couple of things on the above list (telephoto, tripod, Haswell, clothes, driver side window).

Sure, I've only spent 30 minutes banging on Photoshop. I know it will take time, but look what I've already accomplished - here's the before and after results of trying to make this picture of my daughter look better:

Image

Image

See how much blue I was able to pull out of the sky? 8)

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