SDN Photo-a-Day (Rules updates - read the OP)

[aerius]

This is a photo which has nagged on me endlessly, thanks to a stupid camera error (forgetting it was in portrait mode since I was taking pictures of a friend's wedding) the colours & contrast are totally flat, and I've never been able to fix it to my satisfaction. In real life, there was nice golden sunlight coming in at a low angle which gives the Old City Hall building a nice warm & bright glow along with rich saturated colours. The lighting was a lot like this which made Old City Hall really stand out.




A straight B&W conversion was better than most of my attempts to fix up the colour & lighting, but that's not saying much and it still doesn't capture the picture as I envisioned it.




So it was back to Photoshop for more fun & games. Photoshop has a channel mixer tool which can be used for B&W conversions, it basically tells the program how to weight the brightness levels of the various colours when converting to B&W. After some experimentation I'm finally getting something resembling what I saw with my eyes when I took the picture. I also fixed the perspective with the lens correction tool so the vertical lines don't converge. There's still a fair bit of work to be done but I think I'm finally making progress.

[Simplicius]

That's why I love my A640: manual controls, an LCD that folds in, and a viewfinder.

The beach hut looks nice. I like the sense of desolation - would you be able amplify the effect by putting the hut in the corner and shooting more empty space? I know it's probably not good practice but if the context fits...

If the landscape had allowed, it probably would have worked well enough. In this case, a wider angle would have invited a lot of waist-high scrub and part of a stand of fir trees into the frame, and if I had gone far enough back the house would have started to drop below the curvature of the hill.

Cool that you picked a mood out of the photo, though. Good to know I'm doing something right, sometimes.

[Bounty]

I've only just realised you called it "Beech Nut", not beach hut. What am I missing here?

[Simplicius]

Beech Nut is the name of the lodge, after Beech Hill which is the ground on which it is sitting. It was built in 1900 and was just recently structurally restored, and now it belongs to the land trust that owns the preserve.

It's a nice site with a good view of Penobscot Bay as well, and it's a much shorter walk than the mountains just up the road.

[Simplicius]

Finally got two of my many rolls of film developed - a lot of meter-exercise and low-light shots. Postprocessing critique is especially welcome, because I had to correct for underexposure in a lot of cases.* I'm going to post these in batches here rather than give them their own thread.

*This is part of the reason why these look way more low-fi than I expected. The rest is a mystery.



Stone wall, Wiley's Corner, Maine



Lobster traps, Wiley's Corner, Maine



Tire swing, Snow's Point, Maine

[aerius]

Postprocessing critique is especially welcome, because I had to correct for underexposure in a lot of cases.

I think you know it already, but you blew out the whites, big time. The question is, was there any saveable detail & texture in the snow in the unprocessed photos? If there is texture in the originals then it should be possible to save some (or most) of it when correcting for underexposure, unless of course the underexposure is really bad. If you don't mind I'd like to see what I can do with the originals.

[Simplicius]

You're welcome to it. Part of the problem might have been that I wasn't sitting at the best angle to my monitor while I was working (forgot to extend my desk chair), and part of it might have been trying to correct a rather small image with the scanner software. Which leads me to a question: is TIFF a good format for information content and image alterations post-scan, or should I be trying to do as much as possible with the scanner software itself?







Small scale, but this is what they look like right out of the scanner.

[aerius]

Personally I think the first photo looks best the way it came out of the scanner. Any brighter and the snow blows out and loses texture which ruins the image. I couldn't find a better interpretation with Photoshop. The 2nd photo has me at a loss for now, I can't visualize what I want to do with it.



This is my quick & dirty job with the 3rd photo, I selected the sky & ground separately from the water and brightened them up to taste, then did an overall curves adjustment on the photo. This one is darn tricky since the ice floes are almost pure white which makes the water almost impossible to brighten up without making the ice look wrong, I'd have to select the water separate from the ice to do it right. I also think I made the snow a bit too bright while the sky could be brighter, maybe I shouldn't edit photos past my bedtime.

Which leads me to a question: is TIFF a good format for information content and image alterations post-scan, or should I be trying to do as much as possible with the scanner software itself?

Honestly, I don't know. I don't do any adjustments with the scanner software on my computer setup, all I do with the software is make it scan pictures straight to Photoshop where I do all my editing. I tell Photoshop to import pictures via my scanner, it calls up the scanner software to run the scanner and do the scan, then plops the picture straight into Photoshop.

[Simplicius]

Three more:







These were taken at midnight in the middle of a raging snowstorm; exposure was 1/15 or 1/30 or so and the streetlight was the only light so I had out my tripod. The first two are as-scanned, but the third one was too dark to leave alone.

Personally I think the first photo looks best the way it came out of the scanner. Any brighter and the snow blows out and loses texture which ruins the image. I couldn't find a better interpretation with Photoshop. The 2nd photo has me at a loss for now, I can't visualize what I want to do with it.

My main goal was to recover details in the dark areas; that stone wall especially looks like crud when it's that dark. Were I working in a real image editor I suppose I could have inverse-magic-wanded the snow and then only worked on the dark selection, but the scanner software can only do the whole image.

This is my quick & dirty job with the 3rd photo, I selected the sky & ground separately from the water and brightened them up to taste, then did an overall curves adjustment on the photo. This one is darn tricky since the ice floes are almost pure white which makes the water almost impossible to brighten up without making the ice look wrong, I'd have to select the water separate from the ice to do it right. I also think I made the snow a bit too bright while the sky could be brighter, maybe I shouldn't edit photos past my bedtime.

I think the foreground is too dark in your version, though. The trees and the tire swing are of course going to be in silhouette and I never expected to pull detail from the foreground, but I was aiming to lighten it enough that the swing was distinct from the snow it sat in. I'll go back to these eventually, get unaltered scans, and then see what I can do with them.

Honestly, I don't know. I don't do any adjustments with the scanner software on my computer setup, all I do with the software is make it scan pictures straight to Photoshop where I do all my editing. I tell Photoshop to import pictures via my scanner, it calls up the scanner software to run the scanner and do the scan, then plops the picture straight into Photoshop.

Cool. If I didn't have my scanner on a Windows partition and GIMP on a Linux partition I'd try the same thing.

[The Grim Squeaker]

@Simplicus - first batch: Firs shot is good, second is pointless, third is a decent idea but very bad and impossible to see anything as is (slightly better after editing, but still pointless).
Second batch: Second shot has some nice potential in the branches. Third shot is excellent. Dammit, I need a working tripod! (And some snow!).


3 selected shots from the Rocky horror picture show (There'll be a few more from the pre show later, and there's the thread too!)
"I'm Going home!"

Damn fine make up .

IMG_0412

No flash used in this shot, hence it not being crap .

"Like it?"

Obligatory comedy shot .
Come to rocky! Meet weird people! Then make out with them .

[The Grim Squeaker]

3 more shots from the Rocky show, taken from behind the scenes (Hence the framing, lack of flash, and their not being as... dull):
IMG_0325


Well, this was taken during the show:
IMG_0487


IMG_0286

[The Grim Squeaker]

No comments? Well, more portraits then! Until you choke!

3 from the weekend involving my release:


Watchmen. Geek movie watching.


I slightly preferred a bokeh/book version of this, but it didn't translate well into a small web size, so I added this for fun. (Yeah, lighting could be better, but it was in my room, I angled the light as best I could. Stupid lense couldn't focus any closer)


I like fire.

/Red theme

[Darth Mall]

DEATH: Some interesting photos there

The photo with the mask might have benefited from a bit more space to the left of the head. I like how you are filling the frame in all the shots though.

Simplicius: I don't know if its possible, but would you be able to scan directly from the film negatives? Working at walgreens as a photo guy, I can tell when someone scans the pictures in themselves and when they have the one we scanned in. I do love how the white contrasts against the black though.

As for mine, I finally got around to my auto show pictures:

[The Grim Squeaker]

DEATH: Some interesting photos there

hehehe.

The photo with the mask might have benefited from a bit more space to the left of the head.

It was a rush job, i'd have preffered a different angle actually, but it's what I managed. the light source being a tight beam directly behind me was also a problem.

I like how you are filling the frame in all the shots though.

I've discovered an interest in portraits, especially "close up" ones (head/neck only, or closer). Unfortunately, my lenses for it suck (the 30mm has shitty close up abilities and makes people look fat, while my zoom has a hideous aperture when I zoom in, even if it has more magnification than the prime).

Nice auto show photos, I really like the second one, third might have been nicer from an even lower and closer angle to the lights (but is cool), first shot is nice but would have been better further away - it's not as good as the other two.

[Bounty]

The following pictures are not technically good.

I brought in a roll shot with the Zorki the other day. Most of the pictures are from a birthday party - which came out great despite being indoors, even at 1/50 I got pretty sharp images - plus a few odds and ends. These three I liked, though not for them being actually good photographs:



A sculpture in the city. I pass this nearly every day. It's in focus, which is more than I can say of the following shot, but the composition is boring. Still, I like the way the colours came out. It's too bad you can't get very close to it; still, I plan to give these another go.



This one I'm going to go back to to shoot it right. The horse isn't in focus, which is a bummer because it has a very nicely done face. I think the angle could use work too. The problem here is that the farther you move left (and look right), the better the horse looks, but the worse the background gets. It's a shame I didn't have much time to get the picture right, but I plan to rectify that next week. Consider it a teaser.

The next picture was doomed to fail:



This is the lower level of the 14th century Lakenhalle, here used for the blood drive. It's basically a dungeon with poor lighting, so anything flashless was optimistic at best. I took this while waiting in line for a bad, hence the heads in front. This is more a slice-of-life pic than anything I'd consider good photography, but someone might find it interesting.

[aerius]

The problem here is that the farther you move left (and look right), the better the horse looks, but the worse the background gets. It's a shame I didn't have much time to get the picture right, but I plan to rectify that next week. Consider it a teaser.

This is where you get to play with depth of field, depending on your camera & lens it should be possible to setup the shot so that the horse is in focus but the background gets blurred out so it doesn't distract too much from the picture.

[Bounty]

That only works up to a certain shutter speed, no? Unless I got my maths wrong I'd only be able to stop down to f/8-ish with the max shutter speed on the Zorki under those light conditions. That shot was taken at 1/200, f/16 on ISO 400 film.

[Darth Mall]

That only works up to a certain shutter speed, no? Unless I got my maths wrong I'd only be able to stop down to f/8-ish with the max shutter speed on the Zorki under those light conditions. That shot was taken at 1/200, f/16 on ISO 400 film.

Max shutter speed of 1/200? oof.

I love the composition of that shot, but like you said, it needs to be focused. If the horse is sharply in focus, you don't need to have the background be entirely out of focus to draw the eyes to the horse.

[Bounty]

That only works up to a certain shutter speed, no? Unless I got my maths wrong I'd only be able to stop down to f/8-ish with the max shutter speed on the Zorki under those light conditions. That shot was taken at 1/200, f/16 on ISO 400 film.

Max shutter speed of 1/200? oof.

I love the composition of that shot, but like you said, it needs to be focused. If the horse is sharply in focus, you don't need to have the background be entirely out of focus to draw the eyes to the horse.

1/500, actually, but I prefer to stay away from the highest and lowest speed. The camera's been serviced but this equipment is sometimes... flaky.

[Darth Mall]

That only works up to a certain shutter speed, no? Unless I got my maths wrong I'd only be able to stop down to f/8-ish with the max shutter speed on the Zorki under those light conditions. That shot was taken at 1/200, f/16 on ISO 400 film.

Max shutter speed of 1/200? oof.

I love the composition of that shot, but like you said, it needs to be focused. If the horse is sharply in focus, you don't need to have the background be entirely out of focus to draw the eyes to the horse.

1/500, actually, but I prefer to stay away from the highest and lowest speed. The camera's been serviced but this equipment is sometimes... flaky.

Ah, I see.

Now for some pictures from my trip to hong kong, all the big buddah there:



The above I had way over exposed to try and get a solarization effect, which failed miserably, but pulling down the exposure and darkening it gave me this, which I liked the effect of.

[DaveJB]

Here's a couple I've taken over the last two days.

First one was taken with a Sigma 10-20 at f/9 and 1/320s. It kind of sums up the economic situation, even if Lincoln seems to be faring better than most places. This photo's actually something of a compromise, since if I tried to take it straight on I got a massive flare-up which ruined the image, hence I had to take it at a bit of an angle.



Second was with a Canon 70-200L, at f/5.6 and 1/800s. The local birdlife here consists mostly of swans and muscovy ducks (which are supposed to come from South America, so I'm not quite sure why Lincoln has such a population of them), which can make for some great images, but it's a bitch to expose them correctly.

[Bounty]

A leprechaun for your amusement. Digital, f/2.8, 1/400s, manual focussing.

[Big Orange]

I'm a lazy bastard so I took photos of stuff of interest in my back garden during the morning:


Oh look a plane!


Don't blink...


Some daffodils.

[The Grim Squeaker]

@Darth Mall - Awesome photos as always. (That trip provided you with a lot of material, huh?).

@DaveJB - Damn you and your 70-200! And 10-22! Rich bastard!.
First shot is very weak, pointless even. Second shot is nice, would have been better closer up. Razor sharp though, goddamn that's a nice lens. 2.8 or 4.0?.

@Bounty - I don't have much nice to say about this past few pics, except for the dwarf photo which I find rather nice .

3 photos before I go to bed (And post a botanical garden thread tommorow), which I really like:
Paint Buckets

Sign

Taken in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Yawn? Who's looking?

Taken in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

[Darth Mall]

Thanks DEATH! The cars were actually from right before my trip to Hong Kong and Vietnam. I'm finally going through them, so I'll get more up as soon as I can. I like the paint bucket picture.

Bounty, not a bad picture for a power shot. Nice and sharp. The colours a wee bit dull, but I think thats subject vs camera.

DaveJB, I'll agree with death that the first one is a bit dull. A bit to overexposed. But that duck shot it fantastically sharp!

Here are some more from my Hong Kong trip:


Flowers at the flower market




Birds at the bird market.