Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: Dave (Isle of Skye) on November 17, 2012, 06:58:10 pm
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:)
Dave
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Superb, Dave!
You even managed to have two sunstars in the picture (without Photoshop, that is) :)
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Nice one, Dave.
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Indeed. What those guys said.
Plus "Wow!" Looks mythological.
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Stunning!
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+1
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Add my Bravos to the previous comments!
Well done
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Tha gle mhath!
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Thanks all :)
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I'll be the lone voice that isn't echoing praise for this picture. There's no denying that the subject matter is very dramatic. At first glance it's an impressive photograph. But the more I look at it the more I begin to notice things that detract from my first impression. The sky doesn't quite work or me. The subtle coloration in the sky, while the rest of the photograph is monochrome, doesn't make visual sense and gives the photograph an oddly manipulated feel. The lighting of the scene is too much for the dynamic range of the camera to handle, forcing a choice between exposing for highlights or for shadows. By favoring the highlights, we're left with large areas of blocked shadows. I would have opened up the lens a stop and tried recovering the highlights while processing the raw file in Photoshop.
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I'll be the lone voice that isn't echoing praise for this picture...
...I would have opened up the lens a stop and tried recovering the highlights while processing the raw file in Photoshop.
You are advising me that if I had let twice as much direct sunlight into the camera, that the image would look better?
Dave
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I'll be the lone voice that isn't echoing praise for this picture. There's no denying that the subject matter is very dramatic. At first glance it's an impressive photograph. But the more I look at it the more I begin to notice things that detract from my first impression. The sky doesn't quite work or me. The subtle coloration in the sky, while the rest of the photograph is monochrome, doesn't make visual sense and gives the photograph an oddly manipulated feel. The lighting of the scene is too much for the dynamic range of the camera to handle, forcing a choice between exposing for highlights or for shadows. By favoring the highlights, we're left with large areas of blocked shadows. I would have opened up the lens a stop and tried recovering the highlights while processing the raw file in Photoshop.
Doug, The whole point of the picture is the overwhelming brightness from the distant, low sun interrupted by indecipherable verticals. Bringing up the highlights that face us would shift attention away from the brightness of that sun. It would be a very different and, in my estimation, much less interesting picture.
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Doug, The whole point of the picture is the overwhelming brightness from the distant, low sun interrupted by indecipherable verticals. Bringing up the highlights that face us would shift attention away from the brightness of that sun. It would be a very different and, in my estimation, much less interesting picture.
To each his own.
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You are advising me that if I had let twice as much direct sunlight into the camera, that the image would look better?
Dave
That was a suggestion about what to do about 50% of my criticism of the photograph. However, your Canon probably doesn't have enough dynamic range to handle the lighting in any case. There may have been no real solution, short of HDR, which would have sucked. But I would have tried bracketing to see if an alternate exposure would have been closer to the mark.
The other 50% of my critique would have been addressed by leaving the sky monochrome, but what you did there was an aesthetic choice, not a technical flaw. It's just a matter of taste.
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That was a suggestion about what to do about 50% of my criticism of the photograph. However, your Canon probably doesn't have enough dynamic range to handle the lighting in any case. There may have been no real solution, short of HDR, which would have sucked. But I would have tried bracketing to see if an alternate exposure would have been closer to the mark.
The other 50% of my critique would have been addressed by leaving the sky monochrome, but what you did there was an aesthetic choice, not a technical flaw. It's just a matter of taste.
No problem Doug and thanks for your input, I think it is always good for us to discuss our work and the thoughts that other photographers have about it, and I look forward to discussing your work when you post something here.
I remember how difficult it can be posting to a forum for the first time and asking for others to critique my work with no holds barred, as we can all become very protective of what we do, but in the end I always find it rewarding and informative, even if I also sometimes find it difficult to accept initially (I think Walter will attest to that). Because I invariably look back at some point and think I have learnt something, whether it be about how to improve my style/technique or simply to gauge what other photographers think about my work and whether I am still heading in the right direction etc.
Dave
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Makes me think of winters in the north, when you don't see much of the sun for months.
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I find the hint of color in the sky kind of distracting, and I am not sure that it adds anything to the image.
Um, there IS a hint of reddish in the sky, right? I'm not just having a stroke?
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... Um, there IS a hint of reddish in the sky, right? I'm not just having a stroke?
I often notice similar faint color cast in my b&w conversions (which I do mostly in LR).
Could it be because we are still in the RGB mode, which then only attempts to stimulate a grayscale? You know, like when printing, we have also two options (at least with lesser printers): print using grayscale or using RGB.
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I love the photo. Great job.
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I find the hint of color in the sky kind of distracting, and I am not sure that it adds anything to the image.
Um, there IS a hint of reddish in the sky, right? I'm not just having a stroke?
I often notice similar faint color cast in my b&w conversions (which I do mostly in LR).
Could it be because we are still in the RGB mode, which then only attempts to stimulate a grayscale? You know, like when printing, we have also two options (at least with lesser printers): print using grayscale or using RGB.
Dunno, I'm not seeing this on my screen, but as several people obviously are, then I suppose it could be a whole host of factors, different calibration of monitors, the way LuLa uploads the file through different browsers, our different concepts and ability to see colour, the different lighting conditions we are viewing the screen under, even the different O/S's and screens we are using, as everything renders colour (including our eyes) slightly differently it seems.
All I did was add a slight but even sepia tint to the whole image in one hit - so could it perhaps be how the tone has mixed with the various light/white areas of the scene, you know washing out the colour in the lighter areas and intensifying it in the darker areas?
It would be a simple thing to desaturate the image and post a second version, which I will do later today.
Dave
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Dunno, I'm not seeing this on my screen, …
I don't see it either!
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I don't see it (i.e., a color tint) on my screen, and I like the image just the way it is.
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FWIW, I too see a magenta and green cast in the clouds in the large photo in Firefox and Chrome. But if I save it and open in my image viewer, the photo is b&w with a warm tint.
I just changed color management in Firefox (mode=1) and the cast is still there, albeit subtler.
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Sorry, I didn't mean to distract into a discussion of color management!
Now that I know the intent, I see what you're going for. I think a warm/sepia tint harms this one, the thing reads cold/austere/grand to me, so I would lean toward either a pure monochrome, or a selenium type of toning, cold tones rather than warm. That's pretty much just me hewing to tradition, but traditions ARE a large part of what defines how we see photographs.
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All I did was add a slight but even sepia tint to the whole image in one hit - so could it perhaps be how the tone has mixed with the various light/white areas of the scene, you know washing out the colour in the lighter areas and intensifying it in the darker areas?
I had assumed that the coloration in the sky was intentional. First of all, it's definitely there. I checked the image on my monitors at home and at the studio, both of which were custom profiled with an X-Rite colorimeter. It's there. The reason it's there is because of the way you toned it. My personal work is almost exclusively B&W and I always tone my images to simulate traditional selenium toning in a wet darkroom. The best way to accomplish that in Photoshop is not to evenly tone the entire image, but rather to use the Photo Filter, which is in the Image/Adjustments menu. By checking the Preserve Luminosity box in Photo Filter, Photoshop will apply toning differentially, rather than evenly across the entire image. It will apply more toning to the dark and mid values and progressively less toning into the high values. This is a much better approximation of traditional wet toning and it avoids colorizing things like clouds where you don't want to see it. The fact that you can't see it means that either your monitor isn't calibrated correctly or its color gamut is too limited, or both. Mac users often assume that simply relying on the built-in eyeball calibration routine in OS X's Display preferences will be enough to ensure that their monitor is color accurate. Trust me, it isn't. I found that out the hard way. The only way to calibrate a monitor accurately is by using a good colorimeter.
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I had assumed that the coloration in the sky was intentional. First of all, it's definitely there. I checked the image on my monitors at home and at the studio, both of which were custom profiled with an X-Rite colorimeter. It's there. The reason it's there is because of the way you toned it. My personal work is almost exclusively B&W and I always tone my images to simulate traditional selenium toning in a wet darkroom. The best way to accomplish that in Photoshop is not to evenly tone the entire image, but rather to use the Photo Filter, which is in the Image/Adjustments menu. By checking the Preserve Luminosity box in Photo Filter, Photoshop will apply toning differentially, rather than evenly across the entire image. It will apply more toning to the dark and mid values and progressively less toning into the high values. This is a much better approximation of traditional wet toning and it avoids colorizing things like clouds where you don't want to see it. The fact that you can't see it means that either your monitor isn't calibrated correctly or its color gamut is too limited, or both. Mac users often assume that simply relying on the built-in eyeball calibration routine in OS X's Display preferences will be enough to ensure that their monitor is color accurate. Trust me, it isn't. I found that out the hard way. The only way to calibrate a monitor accurately is by using a good colorimeter.
I do use a colorimeter, a ColorVision Spyder3 Pro, always connected to my PC and always self calibrating, so I can only assume it must be an artefact of the low quality JPG compression I use for posting on this forum - in fact I would bet that is exactly what it is.
The image on my computer is a 125mb Prophoto 16bit uncompressed Tiff and the version posted on this forum is a 128k Jpg, so the image you are looking at, has been compressed and reduced in size by 1,000.
Anyways, here is a dead straight desaturated mono version, so any mysterious colouration artefacts anyone now sees in this version, are definitely not there.
Dave
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I like the sky much better in this one.