Bob - Wow, that light and color on the #1 is just amazing. Also my other favorite is the last one, a shot into a narrow cobble stone 'street', or rather a 'path'. Great capture of such an unique space.
Karelg- Congrats that you finally could give your 50 MP a real 'spin'. It seems to me that 50MP was just meant for you. Not only I love the compositions, and exposure, color and textures, I also love the subject you chose for your shots.
Martynas - Stunning capture of light on all of them. Beautiful shadow casted onto snow particle in the air by tree on 1st one, The third shot, that is an absolute beauty. It feels like a beautiful painting. Then again, the amazing color and texture of the last one.. Great set !
Yes all, except the rock where I could rest my hand on the rock, were handheld. All at ISO200, shutter speeds of > 1/100th seem to be OK. Maybe the Zacuto Z-Finder which I use for LiveView focus helps also in stability.
The weird thing about Zeiss images is that you can have quite an unsharp image @100% that will still look very good at a smaller viewing percentage, like the tree trunk from above.
Martynas: those are just wonderfull, my favourites being the last 2. Is that water spraying up form under ice?
Michael: fantastic abstracts! My favourites the first 2. What caused the waves of light in the last?
Thanks for the inspiration all. I've been browsing some 100+ pages in this thread and I am now thinking of getting a 35/2 to my 5DMkII. I almost dare not to say it here but I am very happy with the EF 50/1.4 and also with a new acquaintance Samyang 14/2.8 where I've started to get a hang of MF - in my case via a AF-confirm chip. How do you guys do it, split image, replace the focusing screen with something better or what? Liveview 10x is a bit too slow for me - at least in the way I want to take pictures.
I am truly inspired by this thread to get a 35/2 or possibly a 28/2. I will continue to follow here to help in the decision. Thanks all.
mshi - I love your experiment of motion and blur. I like the #1 and #2. Also wonderful closeups.
Alkanphel - The water drop on grass is just beautiful. (#2 ) I also like the #3 for the deep saturated color
jph1- beautiful shot, great color of sky
Bob - Great sets contrasting Gent's old and new. Beautiful shots.
Collin - Amazing shot of trees. Great detail and composition. B/W is very effective on this shot. A definite wall hanger in my opinion.
Denoir - Great shots. The texture and color of the first shot is stunning, beautiful. My most fav from the set.
Markovic - I love the electric pole series. First one for the beautiful color. Second for the great texture of sky, low view point and composition.
carsten - Great job on the stitching. It is a mystrious one. I love the oof bright area, but it might be a little too overpoweting the balance, but it may not be. It is tough, because in a larger image, it may have the strong enveloping feeling but in the small pic, the focused area at the bottom does not get enough attention. I don't know what you were pondering about, but your comment made me ponder.
otacon - congrats on your ZF35. Looking forward to see more
I was under a bit of time pressure, wanted to make an HDR panorama in the Botanischer Garten here in Berlin, in the large dome area, but it is winter and most things were only green, with no other colour. I didn't like the fake tree trunk in the background either. The whole thing was a bit of a compromise.
I am also working on a laptop, and with 5 shots per frame it takes a while to generate the 16-bit TIFF for each of the 9 shots, and then it takes a long time to generate the stitch, and finally, Aperture is like molasses with the resulting 53MP image, so I was probably a bit impatient in places. I don't enjoy PP at the best of times, but this was really trying. I also ended up with too little in focus in the bottom right, and too much on the top left, so I cropped away about 20MP I would still prefer having more in the bottom right.
Each original image is sharp, but somehow the whole doesn't really do it justice. I might need to go back and repeat the experiment, taking more time. I was on a rock-solid tripod (GT3541XLS) with the RRS pano head (the old one, not the one just released), so it really ought to be lined up correctly. Maybe it is just CS4. I could try again with Photomatix Pro and Autopano Pro and see if it is better, but in the end, I think this image would only really come into its own in wall-size.
I do like it, but there is some ambiguity, as you can see.
I agree that this image would only be really appreciated when it is shown quite large. Sad nature of panoramic I have only tried pano a few times, and got nowhere. Not liking cropping does not help either as without cropping, panos are nothing. The thing I like about this photo the most is the strong sense of cascading space behind the focused bottom right part towards top left. Even in the small jpg, I can see the depth of space. In this size, the wishful thinking was that if there were tiny tad more emphasis on the bottom right. Beautiful color. I had no idea there was a fake tree trunk, you conceiled it very well
