It's too hard to keep track of all the image threads here that are full of both excellent and mediocre images. My hope here is that we can have a conslidated thread open to any equipment of this week's great images.
I also think it would be fantastic to read a bit and pause to be thoughtful about each image. As long as it's a compelling image.
Rules:
Edit:
No Rules. Just TRY TO NOT SPAM THE THREAD WITH YOUR IMAGES
It would also be nice to know what hardware was used to take the photos.
NEX-7 + 24mm F1.8 Sony Zeiss ZA E-Mount
F2
1/60
ISO250
The New York Public Library by Bryant Park is one of the most beautiful libraries that currently exists anywhere in the world. It's an inspiring place to take photographs but also it's easy to fall into the trap of taking the same photos over and over again. I certainly have and will again.
I paused to think about this and while I was doing so, I saw this photo happen as someone else was taking a moment to think about things as well. I enjoy the way the marble floors and walls both express solidity and isolation. I think a common theme in New York City.
Post: I always start out with a Lightroom preset in B&W conversions and then adjust to my taste. I went with heavy contrast here because it was more about silhouette than tonality.
One day, I'll get the Nik B&W converter as I keep hearing nothing but raves about it.
Great idea FPF.....I will add one taken just this past weekend. We were driving back to Savannah, GA when we decided to take a detour and go to the beach on the way back home. My daughter has been begging to go lately but the beaches around us in Savannah are pretty bad. We stopped in St Simons Island, GA and the weather was absolutely perfect. My daughter was so excited she ran to the water and closed her eyes to soak it all in. I moved in quick and got a decent shot....not razor sharp or perfect composition, but gives a glimpse of the moment
Leica M9
75mm f/1.4 Summilux at f/1.4
1/2000
ISO 160
B&W ND 0.9 filter
There were a lot of people walking on the beach and I'm surprised you can't see anyone else in the picture. The 75 Lux obviously blurs things quite well . The lighting was perfect and I wish we could have stayed later. Will make a trip back down soon I hope.
I think this is a great idea, but one more bullet point is necessary; must be "Alt". This conflicts with your 3rd bullet point, so perhaps an edit is required.
If left as is, this thread ought to be moved to "Photo Critique" or "Miscellaneous".
The Canikon forums have plenty of such threads already.
It's coincidental, but will add to the 'kids' theme we've got going here.
Last weekend I photographed a number of hockey games as part of our newspaper's package on a city-wide minor league tournament. I got the usual action shots with my Canon gear, but also brought along the M9 with 21, 28 and 50mm lenses. I ended up using mostly the 21 Lux, at or near wide open. I like to work close but also try to show as much of the environment as possible, which the 21 allows, and it's a great lens for available light work with the high-ISO challenged M9. The kids seem to take these tournaments pretty seriously and that's what I like about the look of anticipation and concentration in the eyes of the two boys in this image. But working so close with kids is a challenge because they will invariably be fascinated by the equipment and have all been trained by their parents to stop and pose for the camera, which is undesirable for nice candids. Luckily they mostly all have relatively short attention spans and are quickly distracted by other action around them, which was the case here, since I was literally a few feet away from them and therefore very obviously photographing them. From a technical perspective I like how the 21 Lux allows good foreground/background separation, especially at closer distances. The environment remains recognizable but at the same time blurred enough to not compete too much with the point of focus.
More photos from the event are posted here in the Leica M9 thread.
Leica M9
Leica 21mm f/1.4, probably at f/1.4, 1/125, manual mode
ISO 1250
Shot as RAW and tweaked in LR3 for WB correction and minor curves adjustment to taste.
Thanks Gary - very appropriate since these players were the Canadiens team. It could be a Tim's ad for sure!
Thanks John - I will take some of the credit for at least being in the right place at the right time. Believe me, at full rez on a 27" display, it really pops! Unlike some of my other images, this one has had minimal PP, therefore it's pretty true to what came straight from the camera. Makes the price of the lens a little bit more bearable with this kind of result.
Well, it's very subjective. The M9 is no high-ISO wunderkind, but it's not unusable if you're careful with exposure and f/1.4 or f/2 lenses are kind of a necessity for this kind of work to keep the ISO at this threshold.
IMO, many photographers are extremely noise averse because they're looking at images at 100% on digital LCD displays, which have a strong tendency to exaggerate the minute tonality differences of neighboring pixels with value differences of a few percent. Analog CRTs provide a smoother rendering and mask this effect, giving a truer representation of ink on paper, if that is your end goal. And viewing at 50% gives a more realistic estimation of appearance in print. Also, it's an 1100 pixel image, so you're not going to see all the nasties. And I didn't try to open the shadows, leaving them natually dark, enhanced in part by the naturally strong vignetting of the 21 Lux wide open.
If you get exposure close, then the M9's noise IMO is acceptable at ISO 1250. I've shot it at ISO 2500 and again, if you're careful with exposure, it's acceptable (IMO), but has less leeway for WB corrections and skin tones can suffer splotchiness. If it's bad, I'll just convert to B&W. If possible I leave it at 640, which was the case for many of the images from this series posted on the M9 thread, and with the 21 at or near wide open, results in a pretty creamy looking image. The only thing I usually do for ISO 1250 is bump chroma NR up to about 35-40 in LR, and leave luminance at zero. But for these images I applied stronger NR, about 25 points luminance, bumped luminance contrast to about 50, and about 35 or 40 chroma, both for the M9 and Canon 1DIV, which I used at ISO 3200. But this NR was only because for newsprint purposes we apply very strong sharpening to compensate for the ink bleed. USM is normally 380/1/2, and with this degree of NR, the images sharpened nicely with very little to be concerned about. I also do some of the PP work at the newspaper and had to process a stack of images from the other photographers that day shooting other venues with D7000s and D300s at ISO 1600-3200, and saw much worse luminance noise from those images.
Very nice work Ron; maybe you should have a word with Tims about licensing it. First word that pops into my mind is "Anticipation" (expression on the second child from the left), and isn't that what they want customers to feel before grabbing their hot coffee and pastry?
Ron I wasn't implying that either the lens/camera combo or pp made the shot, I know there's lots of skill behind the camera. It's just that in this digital world pp has almost become another part of the capture process and skill is sometimes needed post capture to get the best from a shot.
I'm glad this wasn't one of those shots, as much as I recognise the need for good pp skills I'll be the first to admit that my own skills are a bit basic, and seeing such great shots with minimal pp gives us all hope that we can spend a little less time in front of a pc screen and more time behind the camera (as long as we get the shot right in camera in the first place )
Went to the 12 Hours of Sebring for spring break. This is one of my favorite photos among the few hundred I shot over 4 days. Its a Lola T70 Mark III heading out of the paddock for the start of the historic Le Mans support race the day before the main event
John - no worries, I understood what you meant and I was just joking around. Unfortunately such subtleties of expression can easily be lost in text on the web. But I agree with you, and I'm guilty of doing a fair amount of PP to many of my images posted on various threads here. It can be misleading for viewers because it doesn't give an accurate representation of what the equipment produces without intervention. I believe this is one reason why there are protests every time a new Canikon camera is released, blasting the manufacturers for providing boring sample images. Sure, they could tweak a lot of them a great deal for much more impressive results, but then the images would be non-representative of what the equipment produces for everyone out of the box. Anyway, I will almost never put a straight from the camera image online because it can almost always benefit from some tweaking...
Very nice Nigel! I thought you were posting something from the 70s there for a second! The combination of film and a classic Nikkor lens certain add to that aesthetic.
Devin, great feel to that one - could be straight out of a lifestyle shoot.
Ryan, that's a great moment in time and the story really adds to the feel. You're so fortunate to live near the ocean (though of course sometimes there are tradeoffs).
FPF, a classic quality to this one and love your choice of composition. The figure really adds to the image. The next time I'm in NYC, I'll have to check out one or two of the libraries. Is photography allowed inside?
Ricoh GXR M Mount / Zeiss ZM35/2 @ f/2 / ISO 800 / 1/35th
A couple Monday's ago I'd been watching not so much this couple but the light, colours, and condensation on the window in this very warm coffee shop on a rainy Vancouver night. I already had my camera ready when I noticed the ghosts of people walking past outside and on the one shot I took was rewarded with someone turning their face towards the warm interior. It's not an image I care enough about to print but I do like the trio.
Cropped; a little post in LR4 and Silver Efex mostly to turn up the local contrast and burn the edges. The colour original shows what attracted me to the scene but I think I prefer the toned version.
PS: Why do I like it? Mostly because I was able to capture the image in the first place. I carry a small but capable camera all the time now, for the first time since I left 35mm film in the 90's for medium format film. I can therefore I do?
. The lighting was perfect and I wish we could have stayed later. Will make a trip back down soon I hope. 
Will post shots from Alt gear next time.. 
