Taken in Mumbles in Swansea last weekend. I had an ND grad filter to darken the sky, and two solid 4 ND filters to slow the shutter speed to catch some wave movement.
I wish I'd had my wide angle lens with me, but it was a spur of the moment trip since I was already in Swansea working. It's not an amazing photo but it shows some progress for me.
This photo was done with the same set up - both using a sturdy manfrotto tripod. I played about with the RAW files a little to bring out the sand a little more but I still find both pictures a little dull overall. It wasn't so obvious in photoshop last night but the second one needs brightening.
Better res photos can be seen by clicking on the photos. Any advice on how best to manipulate the RAW files to improve the colours etc would be appreciated. Ad astra per aspera
I find that when I manipulate the colours for a bit, I forget what it ought to look like and loose my judgement on whether or not the manipulation has become too obvious and unreal. Ad astra per aspera
Ad astra per aspera
the wrought iron and weathered boardwalk planks really work well together and the purple highlights in the sky are gorgeous.
stunning, i'd give you a ten if i could. it's great to see your style growing over the months, what an eye you have... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
I am still umming and ahing over whether or not to go out with the camera today. We've had rain and sunny spells so I may chance it. I have just cleaned all my leneses and formatted my memory cards. I have my all weather clothing ready so I have no real excuse not to go out. Ad astra per aspera
I ran back to the car and the sun came out in the distance. I didn't get any especially good photos but I'll stick a couple in here in a bit. Ad astra per aspera
then my camera died today, talk about the sunset effect!
it was a samsung techwin digimax S1000/kenox 10.1 mb, and i really liked it, though i hadn't got that deep into what it can do yet.
i'm uncertain whether to get another like it, or go for the 12.0 mb cameras that have come out since.
since most of what i try to capture is light effects, and i'm a complete dummy with manuals, i'd pay a bit more to have quality, but don't really need bells and whistles i probably get around to using.
any suggestions in the €2-300 range, anyone?
such a wonderful last day, though...
i had just mounted paddy today to go ride and two falcons started circling above me, quite low. i turned on the camera to grab some shots and it just lights up for a second then beeps at me, and the lens stays out.
gaah ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
it's moribund, there are flickers of response, but after 2 secs it dies. and yes i tried two fresh sets of batteries.
it's odd, because the lens cap had been jamming for a couple of months, i'd have to tap it for it to fully open, then i dropped it the other day, (first time), and the lenscap worked again.
2 more days of normal life then this...
RIP ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Click for larger
I also changed the tint towards the green a bit because the pink in the clouds didn't seem natural.
The white area under the other colors is just an indication of the proportion of black in the image.
Personally I dislike this tool since one can't tell what is really being changed. I would suggest you try to get the same corrections with the curves tool in the main area of photoshop.
There are way to achieve white balance as well as fixing the overall brightness and contrast. Unlike this tool the curve shapes give you a visual indication of what is being modified.
It takes a bit of time to master, but it is worth it, for images you want to look their best. Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
Clicking with the middle (50% grey) eyedropper on the blue-ish hills in the distance tells Photoshop to white-balance to the opposite of blue-ish, which is this sepia, and then clicking with the white eyedropper in the brightest area, which is the cloud centre-left top. It's not quite the same as using a sepia filter or colorize.
If you try to find a more usual mid-grey you'll get a more accurate colour balance. There are auto-mask methods for finding the 50% level in a shot, but it's usually more fun to click around with the eye droppers at random to see what happens.
This is almost a photo magazine shot. You'd need an even longer exposure on the waves to make them even wispier, an even wider lens, and ideally you'd also need to take it at sunrise or sunset to make everything look dramatically pink or orange. This should be followed by even more dramatic Photoshop colour enhancement, until you get something that looks like a rather poetic episode of Star Trek, where the sky is bright pink and misty and the clouds are made of hydrogen.
I'm not suggesting any of these are a good thing, but it's the kind of style the mags seem happy to print rather a lot of.
I'd rather:
which is a slightly less familiar crop, but I think it still captures some of the essence of the scene.
http://robertdfeinman.com/tips Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
Then I make layers that emphasize these differences - such as a layer to bring out the detail in the rocky cliffs by lifting brightness just in these areas that I have selected by the magic wand. Or distinguishing between the sea/sky and the beach/rocks and making one cooler and one warmer. I used about 6 layers here and then played with the transparency of the layers - most of them just a few percent opacity. So I make raw decisions and then fine time them interactively.
The decisions are always based on telling a story that the audience will accept. The better you know the particular audience, the better you can tell the story.
IMO there is no such thing as a 'true' photograph. You can't be me, I'm taken
IMO there is no such thing as a 'true' photograph.
Acceptance of distortion (starting from the framing) is entirely dependent on the audience - even if the audience is you ;-) You can't be me, I'm taken
Art is, after all, a very precise coordination of mind + eye, plus tool and medium. Serendipity can also play a part - like Japanese calligraphy - but serendipity born of the tools, not of the mind. You can't be me, I'm taken
I managed to bring out some details not seen in the original ;-) You can't be me, I'm taken
When you frame a shot you are translating your total experience of an event, or moment in time, into a narrow channel that not only excludes all the other senses, but also excludes 95% of the spherical moment that you inhabit.
The camera, lens and image capture system that you pick up, is already an intrusion into the total reality of theat moment. If you then make a slight adjustment to contrast and colour of that image, you have already further distorted sensual 'reality'. You can add a lightning strike - that is also distortion. This addition is obvious here, since the original from which it is derived is presented also. But in another situation - sitting in a photo library? Is it real or is it not?
The key is, of course, the audience. What do they accept? How do they react? What have they seen before? Have they had a similar experience to which they can compare?
Just taking a photograph is manipulation. I don't see any difference between the moment (the sketch) and any manipulation that may come later (the work) You can't be me, I'm taken
It is all art. The story depends on you if the audience is zero (just yourself), and also depends on you if the audience is one million. I don't see how the money comes into it. You can't be me, I'm taken
i put it into iphoto and it looked better to me already. i went to the pic by clicking on it and 'borrowed' it from there.
there's a lot of beautiful, interesting textures going on in this pic, but the light was too dull to bring out the richness of the colours, especially the warm brown of the sand.
the frozen splitsecond of the foam, for instance, and the glimpse-of-infinity in the dark water at the left, midway up, above it.
i did a little tweaking, with contrast and sharpness mostly, to bring out the character of the clouds.
hope it comes through ok... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
I wouldn't have sharpened though - or at least not on the stones on the beach. You can't be me, I'm taken
the only thing that was stopping it come through for me was a washy diffused greyness, which had a banalising effect, imo. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
I just adjusted the levels in Photoshop and hit the autocolor button. And out came this. Levels was the biggie.
"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"
Another pier one that I knew what I wanted to achieve but haven't quite managed it. Perhaps it needs the colourful stand to be manipulated separately to stand out more. Ad astra per aspera
You can see it's only filling the left 3/4 of the range, with no really bright points in the image, which is fine if you wanted the image to be low-key, but I don't think you do.
Adjusted histogram - full range.
And the adjusted image:
I haven't done any colour correct to that at all.
you are the media you consume.
This
and this
I'd have been tempted to take the photo stand from low so as to get sky in the faceholes.
Here is the lifeboat house by itself. It was a really superb building.
It's a facade. And that becomes much more obvious in the winter when the colours become weathered and sorry for themselves and nobody engages with it. It can't compete with the real and raw beauty of the coast.
That is why I like out of season piers. Because they have to stop pretending. Ad astra per aspera
This is, in theory, the first of a series of contributions in which I will try and explain my mental model of how a camera works. Actual physics, chemistry or electronics is not going to be available here: while I’m reasonably good with the technical side of photography I’m not all that interested in the intricacies - I just want to be able to extract the effects I want from the tools I have. Other people can correct my idea of how the optics work, how exactly the silver grains in negatives get that way and so on. Not my problem. If I’m not clear, ask away.
A camera is, at it’s core, a simple thing: it’s a box that allows light to fall onto a piece of film or a digital sensor in a controlled way.
At the back of the box is the piece of film or the sensor (5), the details of which will obviously affect the eventual image produced - if you put black and white film in there you’re not going to get a colour picture out. At the front of the box is a hole (1) that allows light in. The distance from the film/sensor - the focal length (4) controls the angle-of-view of the image and the size of the hole controls how much light falls on the sensor. In the hole is a lens (2), which controls how the light is focused on the sensor, and a shutter (3), which controls how long light is allowed to fall on the sensor for. This gives us five basic controls: the nature of the sensor, the size of the hole, the distance of the hole from the sensor, the lens focusing and the shutter speed. Depending on your camera, some of these will be fixed, some will be chosen automatically and some can be controlled by you.
Film or sensor I don’t actually want to talk too much about the thing that we’re letting the light fall on: the film or sensor. For the moment we’ll just say that every sensor has an ISO rating, and the higher the rating, the more sensitive the sensor is and the less light it needs to form an image. Film with a rating of ISO 200 needs half as much light to form a good image as does film rated at ISO 400. There is a trade-off though: the quality of the image tends to suffer as the ISO speed increases. High ISO film tends to have much larger “grain”, while digital sensors tend to get “noisy” as the speed increases:
Low ISO = Slow = lots of light to make a picture = smooth High ISO = Fast = little light to make a picture = noisy/grainy
Low ISO = Slow = lots of light to make a picture = smooth
High ISO = Fast = little light to make a picture = noisy/grainy
Aperture - the size of the hole The hole that lets light in is covered by a magic device that allows us to set the size of the hole, it’s aperture. This is measured in f numbers, running from maybe f1.0 or so up to f64 or even higher. Ranges from f2.8 to f22 are not unusual to see on a lens. The larger the f number, the smaller the aperture - they’re fractions of the diameter of a notional circle, so that f2.8 is 1/2 the circle allowing light in, f4 is 1/4, f5.6 is 1/8 and so on.
Small f number = 1/small number = big hole = lots of light allowed in Big f number = 1/big number = small hole = little light allowed in Aperture also affects the depth of field of the image - more on that later.
Small f number = 1/small number = big hole = lots of light allowed in
Big f number = 1/big number = small hole = little light allowed in Aperture also affects the depth of field of the image - more on that later.
Focal length - the distance of the hole from the sensor The distance of the hole from the sensor, which is the focal length of a lens, controls the field-of-view of the image formed on the sensor by the light.
If the focal length is long, the angle of view will be small and the image will appear bigger on the sensor. If the focal length is short the field-of-view is large and the image appears small in the sensor. The details of this depends on the size of the sensor, so it’s normal to convert to a 35mm equivalent so that we can compare focal lengths on cameras with different size sensors. It would make more sense to talk about the field-of-view, but we don’t generally. Changing the focal length, either with a zoom lens - which allows you to effectively change the distance of the hole from the sensor - or by changing lens, does not have the same effect as moving closer or further from the subject. There are subtle differences in how the subject will be presented between the two.
The lens The lens, which we’re just going to consider magical for the moment, allows us to choose how far away light has to be coming from for it to be in sharp focus on the sensor. Focus 1m away and light coming from 1m will be in sharp focus. Focus at infinity and light coming far away will be in sharp focus. If we didn’t have a lens we wouldn’t get sharp pictures at all - all light would be more or less equally focused, depending on the size of the aperture. With a lens, the aperture affects how much of the picture is in sharp focus - the depth of field. Roughly, the larger the f-number and the shorter the lens the greater the range of distances around the focus distance that will be in sharp focus.
In the “drawing” above the camera is focused on the stick figure. With a small depth-of-field - typical of a long lens (85mm+) and/or a small f-number (say f1.8) only the figure would be in sharp focus, the rest of the picture would be blurred. With a large depth-of-field - typical of wide angle lens and/or large f-number (say f16) almost the entire picture would be in focus, with little blurring showing anywhere.
Controlling how long the light falls for - the shutter The length of time the shutter is open is the other part of what controls how much light falls on the sensor. It also controls how much freezing or blurring of movement can appear on the image. High shutter speeds allow in little light and freeze movement, while slow shutter speeds allow in lots of light but movement will blur. 1/500 of a second is fast. 1/30 of a second is slow.
Putting it together The ISO of the sensor controls how much light it needs to make a good image. The aperture and the shutter speed control how much light falls on the sensor. The focal length controls the field-of-view that the light will come from Taking a picture is a matter of balancing those controls.
In the shot I posted in photos as usual of the spiral shell on the sand I wanted shell and sand to be in full focus because the detail of the grains worked really well with the shell.
In this one I wanted the eye to be drawn to the holes in the stone - although I wonder if the DOF could have been a bit larger because the blurred side of the stone on the right hand side is a bit distracting. Ad astra per aspera
Film with a rating of ISO 200 needs half as much light to form a good image as does film rated at ISO 400.
Is there a mistake in this sentence, or does "higher ISO" means lower number, or am I not awake yet to comment on technical matters?
Great tutorial, BTW. Helps clarify my misformed notions that came from a physics rather than photography viewpoint. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
For a film camera, a bright day would use ISO 100. An overcast day would use ISO 400 which needs less light to capture a photo with.
With digital you can get very large ISO numbers for night shots and very low light but it does get very grainy eg at ISO 1600. Ad astra per aspera
Is it worth adding that, in old money, the ISO was sometimes referred to as the "speed" of a film?
In other words, for a given light level, you can take a picture with a higher shutter speed/shorter exposure if you're loaded with a "fast" (ISO 400) film than a "slow" one (ISO 100).
Where you really notice this is in photographing moving objects that you want to keep in focus. Like children.
Hey, Grandma Moses started late!
