abhijeeth, did you use warm white balance in \"Sol Duc waterfalls\" (and \"Essence of the Hoh\") on purpose (I like the photos, but this kind of technical thing bugs me when I watch photos)? It looks way too warm and soft to me. Liked also your wife\'s \"Fresh\". Regards mountains without ugly rental car; they are coming, I try to process photos in order (by date & time) since all earlier holidays I just process few photos and then got bored and I have lots and lots of photos from all past holidays, which I have never seen larger than 400-500px thumbnails when browsing photos. PS. Many photos I post to other Zeiss thread since I used C/Y Distagon 25 quite a lot.
Samuli: This is the part that I love most about photography - our individual tastes and preferences. ! Thanks for the frank feedback, they are well taken, but I just love these the way they are now !
BTW, both are Camera Standard profile and Cloudy WB preset. Even though I shoot raw, I also shoot with JPEG and fine-tune the Picture Style -WB interaction first [specifically the color tone axis from green-to-magenta] while previewing the picture in LiveView. This JPEG gives me a 2nd reference point to remember when I cook the RAWs later on. The first reference point being my memory.
The 2nd one is pretty darn close to being spot on, and I shot it at f/2, so everything is not sharp and in focus (on purpose).
The first one is close but not spot on, still some deviation present [especially on the HSL values of browns on the tree-trunks in the BG, [easily tweak-able by shadow tint] - which I could finesse further. That is w.r.t the WB.
Regarding the softness, the big part of the waterfall is right below and to the right [not in the photo], so it looks small and innocent here but it does kick up a lot of spray and mist constantly [==> wipe lens often]. So that gives the soft low contrast look on top of some detail. It would have showed the same even if I shot it at f/5.6. I find this look especially useful for forests.[For a similar same reason, I feel the 50 1.4 or 35 1.4 would also have excelled in recording these scenes the way I wanted to convey them. Even the 35/2 would have helped. Excellent contrast on coarse structures, less so on the finer structures]
Me and my wife also experimented with blowing fog on the lens for a partial exposure [nothing new there, an old trick used by folks] to render the highlights even softer and the results was fun.
It is somewhat crazy and counter-intuitive to do it on one of the sharpest lenses there is, but it makes all of this fun!
Finally, talking of cars in mountains...I thought this might be fun too!
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W.r.t your photo set, I like the layered effect [different hues of green + fog] in the 2nd one. Looking forward to seeing more of your shots from this trip
:Trusty, funny portrait I cannot imagine any other name but \"who farted?\"
Trusty: I was wondering about that too: \"why is he closing his nose?\" !!
! Thanks for the frank feedback, they are well taken, but I just love these the way they are now 