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Fun with MF images - ARCHIVED - FOR VIEWING ONLY

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Christopher

Active member
Just before leaving to a new project tomorrow, I wanted to share two images from last year. I can't wait to see the new icehotel, but it will be hard to be even better. Last year was amazing.

Icebar 2011 - Rm3di - 32mm - P65

Design by Jens Thoms Ivarsson, Mats Nilsson and Jon Nilsson




Icehotel 2011 - Rm3di - 32mm - 2 image stitch - P65

Design by Anna Sofia Mååg




Icehotel 2011 - Rm3di - 32mm -3 image stitch - P65

Design by Ben Rousseau & Ian Douglas-Jones
 

Wayne Fox

Workshop Member
After seeing all the great Death Valley stuff I had to go through my images from last April. I reworked this one and like how it turned out.


PhaseOne DF/p65+ with Schneider 55mm, 1/40 at f/8, ISO 200
 

tashley

Subscriber Member
Pass the Sauce

You know when you trek miles to the stores to buy all the right ingredients, slave for hours over preparing the meal, and then after just one taste you know it's doomed and you have to say 'pass the sauce'....

Happened to me yesterday. Long trek to Kingley Vale, the finest Yew forest in Europe. Cambo, SK35XL, IQ180, Gitzo Carbon, Cube, a 2000 year old tree.... the equivalent of the finest ingredients. Three LCC'd exposures for an HDR merge. Not terrible technique... a reasonably experienced chef... take it all out of the oven and... pass the sauce. Quite a lot of sauce, as you can see.

A cautionary tale! This is a place to share our failures too...

 

dick

New member
Re: Pass the Sauce

Cambo, SK35XL, IQ180, Gitzo Carbon, Cube, a 2000 year old tree.... the equivalent of the finest ingredients. Three LCC'd exposures for an HDR merge.
A cautionary tale! This is a place to share our failures too...
Some people's best shots are not that good.

Some people have not dared to post any pictures.

¿Were you thinking tooo much about the kit and the trek, and not enough about composition and lighting?

¿Perhaps using five shots would have given you more scope to tame the highlights and shadows?

I have a nice large beech tree that I have to prune back to prevent it banging on my bedroom roof and window...
 

tsjanik

Well-known member
It takes considerable courage to post the failures and self-confidence as well; poor shots are only apparent when you can recognize the good ones. I like the food metaphor but would warn you that Mark Dubovoy got roasted in the forums at Luminous Landscape for comparing photography and fine wine.:LOL:
 

tashley

Subscriber Member
@Dick, I did actually shoot several 5 shot HDRs but HDR Pro chokes on more than three 16bit tiffs from the 180! But the shot was doomed by the composition more than anything. I took a few other views in the forest but it's a hard place to find a spare, minimalist view because there's always a lot going on in the background. I googled for images of it today and they are pretty much all confusingly composed.. Next time I'll take a short tele and use DOF to eliminate the clutter.

@tsjanik... roasting Mark would be a waste of a very fine photographer and essayist. But maybe if served with a fine wine the sacrifice would be worth it?
:)
 

dick

New member
@Dick, I did actually shoot several 5 shot HDRs but HDR Pro chokes on more than three 16bit tiffs from the 180! But the shot was doomed by the composition more than anything. I took a few other views in the forest but it's a hard place to find a spare, minimalist view because there's always a lot going on in the background. I googled for images of it today and they are pretty much all confusingly composed.. Next time I'll take a short tele and use DOF to eliminate the clutter.
¿Would a bigger computer help you handle 5 shot HDR?

You have good separation between branches due to light and shade, but it still looks a bit 2D: Blurring out the backgrounds might help.

Using tilt, you can blur the background behind the main subject, but have it sharp elsewhere, but this might be difficult to put into practice in this type of shot.
 
The composition is quite fine, in my view. What kills the images is the impossible contrast of bright sunshine. A drizzly day would be a different story!
 

dick

New member
The composition is quite fine, in my view. What kills the images is the impossible contrast of bright sunshine. A drizzly day would be a different story!
There is no easy solution... "flat" lighting tends to make things look ...flat, bright light gives you contrast, and, usually, depth.

Wide angles tend to give a better rendering of depth than longer lenses.

Ideal lighting is often bright or partially obscured sun with lots of fill-in reflectors (clouds).

5 shot HDR might have tamed the contrast, MF post-production can enhance contrast if required.
 

tashley

Subscriber Member
The composition is quite fine, in my view. What kills the images is the impossible contrast of bright sunshine. A drizzly day would be a different story!
To be honest, much of that is down to the JPEG compression for upload: on the tiff there are very very few, small patches of pure black and the shadows all have detail. But I do agree that a bright day with some thin cloud cover would have made it smoother.

@Dick, its a Mac Pro tower with a gazillion cores and 8gig of ram. Maybe some more RAM would help but I have found some of the current generation of NIK software rather glitchy so it might just be that. Color Effex Pro 4 sometimes saves an entire image I've been working on for ages as a black frame - but given how amateurish that Fun With Filters look is, that might be no bad thing!
:ROTFL:
 

tsjanik

Well-known member
All the great images from Death Valley prompted me to look at some of my old film shots from that area; tashely's post prompted me to post this one from 2005 (67 film camera). It was taken from Whitney Portal looking down at the Owens Valley. When I saw the sun hitting the small hill in the foreground and the tree silhouette, I thought for sure I had a winner, and yet somehow something is lacking. No real point of interest? No pleasing graphic quality? Nowhere for the eyes to go?

Tom

 

MGrayson

Subscriber and Workshop Member
Perhaps a crop with the tree shadow in the lower right and just the bottoms of the clouds at the top? The sunlight in the foreground is beautiful!

--Matt
 
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