bigkidneys wrote:
Will throw in a couple more. Wanted to take some photos of my daughter today as we rarely get to spend a day together by ourselves. I really like how the B&W conversion came out but truthfully have no idea what to do for portraitures... Ie. background selection, when wide open or stopped down, etc... I used my tripod which I am learning although it is a serious PITA to haul around, the chances of an OOF image is lessened considerably. Any thoughts?
I think it's a cute photo, but what strikes me is it's flat and lacking dynamic range (which I would tackle before B+W conversion; please ignore the quasi tutorial if you know it already). Generally speaking, you want somewhere in your photo the whitest white and the blackest black, with of course everything else in between. When you pull up your photo in photoshop's levels, the curve reveals no data where highlights should be. By moving the endpoint slider (white one) to match where your whites begin (right tip of histogram), it starts to come to life. In Lightroom and other programs, you'd adjust "exposure" till the right side of the exposure curve data matches the right side of the histogram box to get this effect. I sharpened it slightly and boosted the overall brightness and contrast (in curves for photoshop) somewhat. The end result is more life in the photo, more pop. I'm not going to critique the composition except to say I found the left portion of the photo mildly distracting, so I cropped it out leaving a solid bark pattern to the left of your daughter. It's not an optimal redo because I was working with a small file, but here's the before and after (it may be slightly over sharpened):
Hi Carsten, I am spending 6 weeks in Guatemala right now.
Hardly time to take photos beside my work.
Did not take any of my Olympus lenses with me.
My "only" gear consists of 5DII plus Samyang 14mm, 35mm and 85mm.
Here are some few impressions from Guatemala so far:
Idurita, like the shots, plenty of potential. But are they stitches or crops - and straight out of cam or what? Given your lenses (I have two of them, tried the third) you could make a whole lotta more sharpness-wise. They all can produce razorsharp images, both if you want to use them wideopen with bokeh - or if you wish as I assume here - cover a great DOF.
It's a stitch of course! And done with an 85mm FL.
It looks like about 8x3 before cropping on the second one.
I can't really critique on the second one as for me the content isn't interesting - no offense!
The first one is interesting - the one with the tree and ruins.
My crit on that one would be:
You need a higher POV to make that work well. Maybe on top of that hill over in the right area?
The smearing on the near tree trunk detracts too much from it and is too distracting.
I think I would use Shadows & Highlights to pull the clouds down just a tad and raise the blacks up from their apparent clipped state.
For me the tree-smack-in-the-middle-of-the-shot framing doesn't really work either. At least not in this case.
The horizon went goofy too - this is a common problem with panos. It can be fixed in PS by using Free Transform --> Warp prior to cropping (if you don't auto-crop in the stitcher).
IDURITA wrote:
Hi Carsten, I am spending 6 weeks in Guatemala right now.
Hardly time to take photos beside my work.
Did not take any of my Olympus lenses with me.
My "only" gear consists of 5DII plus Samyang 14mm, 35mm and 85mm.
I'll try to offer my impressions as well. The second image really isn't all that interesting to me either, but I think it's because it is lacking focus. I appreciate that you are adding context to where you are, and as a shot that is purely that, it works very well. What doesn't seem to work (at least for me) from an artistic standpoint is that it is lacking focus. What are we supposed to be looking at? is it the church, the people, the cross? Recomposing on the cross or the church specifically and leaving out the extraneous seems like the best move that could be made when looking at this as an "artistic" representation of where you are. Just as a final caveat, I think this image would add a lot to an online gallery where you have taken many images of this church. Often times I see a gallery of images and there is no sense of context and it makes you wonder, what is around this place?
The first image is more interesting, but again I think there are too many things competing for our attention. The trees, being cropped the way they are, at least in my eyes do not add much. The ruins, however, are very visually interesting. Framing it to where the trees don't seem "cut," or just plain getting closer to the ruins (if it's even possible) would make it stronger.
Ok, I'll add a treat to this thread. A PP treat. I just got a fourth Contax G in my inventory, the 21/2.8. Here's the story: a couple of days ago I sat on the subway towards work early in the morning. Heading towards downtown the subway crosses some bridges and I saw the bleak low angled morning light hit the facades of one of the islands in Stockholm. I had to get off the station and walk back on a bridge to take some shots before continuing the subway to work.
I took perhaps 20 images (typically 2-3 on each scene - old habit) before going back to the train. Looking at the images at home I find myself thinking that "these are quite good" but dont really replicate the light that was there. Exposure was ok, but the eyes saw more. So I did some PP to get there.
First one is straight out of cam - zero PP. The second is PP'd - and much more what my eyes saw. It's not the same image - but taken seconds apart. Hard criticism welcomed.
Bifurcator wrote:
Looks alright to me. What look are you going for here? The hard yellow light of a sunrise through a misty morning on the California coast?
That is from about 60 to 90 minutes before sunset. There was enough
moisture in the air that getting a really sharp image wasn't going to happen.
I decided that processing this as a dreamy pastel shot with some extra
saturation was the best choice.
trumpet_guy wrote:
That is from about 60 to 90 minutes before sunset. There was enough
moisture in the air that getting a really sharp image wasn't going to happen.
I decided that processing this as a dreamy pastel shot with some extra
saturation was the best choice.
I think extra saturation isn't really needed (not much anyway), but a bit more contrast in the lightness channel can make things more lively though. The 2nd version looks livelier to me but the colors a little bit overcooked.
Thanks Bif for comments and alteration of the Stockholm watery scene. Yes, there could be a certain amount of excessive artificial vignetting on that, probably a good idea to step it down some. I think you may have boosted the colors - which scares me a little since I thought I may have overdone that part to :-)
