The first image is easily the best one, but IMO is improved with a crop on the right - about 1/5th or 1/6th of the image width. I think it strengthens the composition.
m.sommers00 wrote:
Great shots! A little cool for my taste but really like the processing, especially #2.
Did you do some blending on these?
Thanks!
No blending, these are single shot RAW images. On every photograph I take, regardless if it is a landscape or not, I always look at it in black and white first, and usually do some basic dodging and burning to make sure the values hold in black and white before flipping to color. If it does not, I almost never continue editing.
On all these shots, there is a good amount of dodging and burning to amplify areas I want the viewer's eye to go and to reduce areas where I do not. The Sony RAWs are very malleable and lends itself to dodging and burning.
These are all great shots. The redness on the third one looks a bit artificial to me though (I started to read others comments now and see this bothers other people too). These are all pine trees, evergreen, so this is some software manipulation thing going. Also, the big pine tree to the right has an unusual blue/green color cast. That tree must've been composed in from a picture taken on a different planet. If you didn't manipulate colors this much you would have great shots....
A really interesting set that seems to have completely divided the forum. Some work for me, some don't but I simply love #2 (maybe because I have no idea what Half Dome looks like)
Very nice and very dramatic images. Personally - I love #1 and #2. I like your processing on these and I like the light on #2 very much. I think they "work" really well.
Nov 20, 2015 at 11:15 PM
Mark Metternich Offline • • • • • • Upload & Sell: On
The first is my favorite and takes my breath away!
#2 looks great and totally works for me.
#3 looks GREAT! I LOVE the dark mood and I don't gravitate toward a photo journalism realism. I love and always will love a touch of creativity in rendering and I think it works GREAT!
#4 I don't mind the touch of Magenta here, but there certainly is an argument for it being more neutral.
#5 Looks spot on to me and I would not change a thing!
So, a KILLER series and breathtaking to say the least.
I really like 1 and 2. Nice processing to capture the stormy mood. Also, the compositions help me to think on other ways of seeing landscape images as I often get stuck in the ultra wide, grand vista mindset in my own work.
That first one... so pretty. That's one to be proud of for sure.
I would love to see how you went about editing these. Dark or not, as Bandi mentioned, there's a cinematic feel here that's really neat to look at, IMHO.
Nice images John and welcome to the forum. As far as processing goes I think it should be anything goes. However the viewer is entitled to their opinion too and so I'll give you mine :-)
The red in the trees has been commented on with the reaction (well that's very left brained). I'm going to disagree on that one (as you probably imagined) however I'll say why.
When we're photographing and representing reality, the viewer holds a suspension of disbelief for as long as they can. Because of this they are willing to let many 'distortions' of photography pass because they are familiar with them. The images they see can either be wholly 'artistic', in which case the view accepts them for what they are, or they can remain in a 'photographic' mode, where the viewer accepts that they are seeing something 'real'.
The problem for many people is the boundary between these two modes. It's obvious that people can accept extreme distortions of reality (i.e. the extreme HDR, fisheye wide angles, etc) and they are also happy to read a landscape as real. The biggest problem is when a viewer is engaged in photographic way of reading an image and they are presented with something that just does not compute in any way.
Your maroon trees I think fit in this gap. The rest of the image is saying 'pre dawn, misty morning' but all of a sudden we have christmas tree light like spots of super saturation. People will try their best to resolve this, probably by saying 'oh it must be the dawn light' but this doesn't work because the red 'light' doesn't distribute itself like a dawn glow, neither does the colour cast of the image show this effect. The viewer is then left with only one way to resolve what they see and that is Photoshop.
It would have been easier for people to accept if this 'spot colour' approach was used across your other images. This would communicate that 1) it was intentional and hence 2) the photographer had a reason for doing this (hopefully beyond just the visual) and 3) Hopefully the viewer can then spend the time trying to interpret the series for what it was trying to communicate.
So the Photoshopping itself isn't an issue, it's the cognitive dissonance of the viewers perception of the image.
Not everybody will have this reaction - it does depend to some extent on people's photographic awareness.
Personally I'm not unhappy with some of this effect. I think I can see what you're trying to do but it isn't obvious when you post it to a 'straight edge' landscape photography forum. However, the intense reds are too shouty for me.
I hope that explains a little why people might be reacting as they have..
timparkin wrote:
Nice images John and welcome to the forum. As far as processing goes I think it should be anything goes. However the viewer is entitled to their opinion too and so I'll give you mine :-)
The red in the trees has been commented on with the reaction (well that's very left brained). I'm going to disagree on that one (as you probably imagined) however I'll say why.
When we're photographing and representing reality, the viewer holds a suspension of disbelief for as long as they can. Because of this they are willing to let many 'distortions' of photography pass because they are familiar with them. The images they see can either be wholly 'artistic', in which case the view accepts them for what they are, or they can remain in a 'photographic' mode, where the viewer accepts that they are seeing something 'real'.
The problem for many people is the boundary between these two modes. It's obvious that people can accept extreme distortions of reality (i.e. the extreme HDR, fisheye wide angles, etc) and they are also happy to read a landscape as real. The biggest problem is when a viewer is engaged in photographic way of reading an image and they are presented with something that just does not compute in any way.
Your maroon trees I think fit in this gap. The rest of the image is saying 'pre dawn, misty morning' but all of a sudden we have christmas tree light like spots of super saturation. People will try their best to resolve this, probably by saying 'oh it must be the dawn light' but this doesn't work because the red 'light' doesn't distribute itself like a dawn glow, neither does the colour cast of the image show this effect. The viewer is then left with only one way to resolve what they see and that is Photoshop.
It would have been easier for people to accept if this 'spot colour' approach was used across your other images. This would communicate that 1) it was intentional and hence 2) the photographer had a reason for doing this (hopefully beyond just the visual) and 3) Hopefully the viewer can then spend the time trying to interpret the series for what it was trying to communicate.
So the Photoshopping itself isn't an issue, it's the cognitive dissonance of the viewers perception of the image.
Not everybody will have this reaction - it does depend to some extent on people's photographic awareness.
Personally I'm not unhappy with some of this effect. I think I can see what you're trying to do but it isn't obvious when you post it to a 'straight edge' landscape photography forum. However, the intense reds are too shouty for me.
I hope that explains a little why people might be reacting as they have..
Just to be clear, if you read my first initial response - I 100% disagreed with Jim's comments - but I did so in a civil and polite manner. I also explained why I disagreed. I feel this is important when critiquing - just as you have explained in your post why people may not like what I did with the colors because this forum is a more "straight edge" landscape forum.
Even if I do not ask for C&C in a post, I most definitely welcome them. Positive or negative.
My issue here is not negative feedback nor a be-wilderness of why others do not like the colors, but the double standard in which I am not allowed to reply to a feedback. I was told I was being "defensive", Jim is a "truth teller", and had no right to tell a forum moderator that I disagreed with him in a "public forum". That is why I responded the way I did.
If this is a public forum, do I not have the right to politely disagree? If others are entitled to an opinion, am I not entitled to disagree? I was just taken aback and surprised by the double standard.
