Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: Todd Suttles on January 13, 2014, 06:36:14 pm
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Asking for PP critique and suggestions. Thanks in advance, -t
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Love the single plant & it's corner -- the rest pulls me away ...
Sorry to be so bold & forward ;-(
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Love the single plant & it's corner -- the rest pulls me away ...
Sorry to be so bold & forward ;-(
Thank you Cjogo. That is exactly what I am hoping for. How am I EVER going to learn anything while harboring a sensitive ego? Truth be told, I didn't think much of the photo at all until you cropped it. However, I did think that I had done a little better job in PP than I would have a couple weeks ago. I was waiting to see who said what about the processing. Given the original capture it was a difficult image to process (for me) -which is exactly what I used it for. Thanks again and I would hardly consider your comment bold or forward... -t
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Your welcome most graciously TODD ...
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Love the single plant & it's corner -- the rest pulls me away ...
Sorry to be so bold & forward ;-(
Exactly.
Mike.
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I liked the echoed shape of table/flowers, actually. I might have stepped a little bit to my left, to visually separate the two, and positioned the camera to place them more in opposing corners of the frame.
Still, it was a good instinct in the first place, and I don't mind the original at all.
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Andrew and I often agree, but this time we don't.
Todd, It's an interesting attempt, but PP isn't where "it's at." Where "it's at" is the moment the shutter trips. Post-processing is a necessary evil, but the name of the game is to make an exposure that doesn't need more than minimal post-processing.
What I see in the original is two different ideas jumbled together that don't work together. Cjogo's crop throws out one of the jumbled ideas and leaves a fairly clean still life but with PP that creates a blown-out background that chops up the picture.
I'd suggest that if you're going to do a table and a window -- a great choice of subjects by the way, at least in the abstract -- you include a human. That makes it a whole different, and much more interesting kind of thing . People at tables in front of windows always make a great subject. When I read your title, that's what I expected to see.
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Todd, It's an interesting attempt, but PP isn't where "it's at." Where "it's at" is the moment the shutter trips. Post-processing is a necessary evil, but the name of the game is to make an exposure that doesn't need more than minimal post-processing.
Thanks Russ, you have defined my delima. I have only been shooting digital for a couple years. In the late 80's and early 90's I shot transparency and B&W film mostly. I had a good internal sense of how to get the results I expected; not always of course, but frequently. Maybe it is only in my head, but I feel like I am a fish out of water, that I need to learn how to swim in digital capture & process. They are very different, at least to me from the old days. It is like I need to now what I can do (technically) before I can intuitively create using it.
I know exactly what you are saying, I am currently re-reading Feininger's book "The Creative Photographer" for that very reason. I just today read "... explains why the majority of photographs are meaningless and dull. As previously noted, the attitude of the photographer towards his medium, revealed in his approach to his subject, decides the success or failure of his picture. For know-how is of very little use unless guided by know-why".
I frequently debate with myself about establishing a relationship with a good lab and not worry with the processing/printing; just let them worry about pulling out what I want from the image. But that feels like cheating and not paying the dues.
I will post a few of my pictures from the film days below. I have had a few slides scanned and converted, but I want to go forward and those feel like going backward even though I know they have more "know-why" to them than my recent digital stuff. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and experience. I read everything you guys write to one another as well as to me and it is helping me along the road more than you know. -t
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I frequently debate with myself about establishing a relationship with a good lab and not worry with the processing/printing; just let them worry about pulling out what I want from the image. But that feels like cheating and not paying the dues.
Never let someone else worry about what you create.
While I agree with Russ that the moment of tripping the shutter is important, a shitty print can make an image look like...well, like shit. Shitty processing is fine for street shooters, they really don't care how the tones look. From what I have seen that you've posted here, you seem to like landscape. I'm sure Russ will groan but if you haven't read Adams' books the Camera, the Negative and the Print, do so. It will give you insight into the importance of processing, be it wet or "dry."
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In my work -- and what I have read & learned personally from some the greats ::
First -- the creative eye ~ you have to compose -- I was always taught > you are responsible for everything in your frame > corner to corner ( & why I rarely crop )
Second -- Pre was a very important part of the creative process .. and would save you time & $ in the post/ darkroom. I per-visualized ever shot. I knew what tone I wanted every object in the image to fall into. Not burn and dodge it later....
The tones are pretty much right on your meter :-) https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTCdstaZytsQC83t-Rr0BiPePN8HnMZvHasDP1exArC-PzvMFco
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Never let someone else worry about what you create.
While I agree with Russ that the moment of tripping the shutter is important, a shitty print can make an image look like...well, like shit. Shitty processing is fine for street shooters, they really don't care how the tones look. From what I have seen that you've posted here, you seem to like landscape. I'm sure Russ will groan but if you haven't read Adams' books the Camera, the Negative and the Print, do so. It will give you insight into the importance of processing, be it wet or "dry."
Hey man, that's my old username you're using :D! I changed mine a while back when LuLa gave us the opportunity to convert over to our real names. Not that I mind of course. :-\
Anyway dear namesake, I agree with you completely about the importance of keeping processing to yourself in the digital workflow. Good capture is essential, but much of the creativity comes in post processing. I can't imagine leaving that side of photography to some guy in a lab.
I'm not so sure about printing though. I do all my own printing myself but I would have thought that provided you do your own processing and soft proofing in a fully colour managed environment then a good lab should be able to make a good print of your final output file.
I frequently debate with myself about establishing a relationship with a good lab and not worry with the processing/printing; just let them worry about pulling out what I want from the image. But that feels like cheating and not paying the dues.
Don't do it Todd! See above. You are making very rapid progress at getting good at processing... just go back and look at some of your early efforts you posted here versus what you are doing now.
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I'm sure Russ will groan but if you haven't read Adams' books the Camera, the Negative and the Print, do so. It will give you insight into the importance of processing, be it wet or "dry."
I grew up on Adams's books, Ed. In film days I did a lot of Adams-type shooting with a 4 x 5 view camera. I was way into the zone system. Sometimes I even modified my developer chemistry in accordance with the stuff in Ansel's books.
But, bottom line: what matters is subject and technique. Capture technique; not post-processing technique. If what you're shooting is crap, if your exposure is off, or if your composition is lousy, you can do all the frantic post-processing you want to do and it won't help. I ROTFL when I read somebody supposedly "teaching" photography (an impossibility on the face of it) tell his readers that you should go out and shoot and if you examine the result you can find many pictures within the shot. If you can do that, you're screwed. You blew it. You didn't know what you were doing. I have a friend who enjoys working on his pictures on his computer a lot more than he enjoys shooting the pictures in the first place. He does things like making people smile who weren't smiling, opening eyes that were closed., etc. He sometimes can fool the ignorant, but anybody with eyes to see can detect the fakery.
In post-processing, unless you were shooting at high ISO you almost always need a bit of sharpening. Sometimes you need to extend the tone curve a bit, and sometimes, if you had a difficult lighting situation you need to do a bit of color correction. But if you need to do more than that: crop, mess with the exposure, etc., you screwed up, and what you end up with is always going to be less than optimal.
There are exceptions. Ansel's Moonrise Over Hernandez is an example. When he made that shot he knew exactly what he was after, but the lighting conditions could only give him the framework of what he later had to bring out in the darkroom. Nonetheless, his framing and exposure, even though he had to guess at the exposure, were good. If they hadn't been, if Ansel hadn't had an artist's eye, Moonrise never would have seen the light of day.
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Thanks Russ, you have defined my delima. I have only been shooting digital for a couple years. In the late 80's and early 90's I shot transparency and B&W film mostly. I had a good internal sense of how to get the results I expected; not always of course, but frequently. Maybe it is only in my head, but I feel like I am a fish out of water, that I need to learn how to swim in digital capture & process. They are very different, at least to me from the old days. It is like I need to now what I can do (technically) before I can intuitively create using it.
I know exactly what you are saying, I am currently re-reading Feininger's book "The Creative Photographer" for that very reason. I just today read "... explains why the majority of photographs are meaningless and dull. As previously noted, the attitude of the photographer towards his medium, revealed in his approach to his subject, decides the success or failure of his picture. For know-how is of very little use unless guided by know-why".
I frequently debate with myself about establishing a relationship with a good lab and not worry with the processing/printing; just let them worry about pulling out what I want from the image. But that feels like cheating and not paying the dues.
I will post a few of my pictures from the film days below. I have had a few slides scanned and converted, but I want to go forward and those feel like going backward even though I know they have more "know-why" to them than my recent digital stuff. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and experience. I read everything you guys write to one another as well as to me and it is helping me along the road more than you know. -t
Hi Todd,
I like all three of the pictures from your film days. In all three you picked a subject, composed a picture, and shot. Exposure obviously was good. Composition was good. The result was good.
What I don't understand is what you think the difference is between film and digital. Feininger is right on the money. What matters isn't the medium; what matters is the message. Hasn't anything to do with whether you're shooting film or digital.
I don't think having a lab do your processing is "cheating." If it were, Cartier-Bresson would be the world's worst photographic cheater. Instead, he's the most influential photographer of the twentieth century. Voja Mitrovic did Henri's printing. Henri was too busy doing the important thing: finding great subjects in situations with interesting geometry and shooting them. There is one problem with having a lab do your printing: you also need to let them do things like sharpening and color balancing, because they're the ones who know what their equipment requires. But that situation, in this case in B&W terms, is why Voja did all of Henri's printing. He knew what Henri wanted and could produce it consistently.
Quit worrying about the transition from film to digital. The principles are exactly the same. Check my lecture on digital at http://www.russ-lewis.com/Photo%20Lecture_files/intro.html. I put that together ten years ago for people in my winter community who were transitioning from film to digital. You probably won't learn anything from it because you're already a competent photographer, but you might find it interesting.
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WOW! Thanks everyone for so much input. I appreciate your help... lots to digest and incorporate. I love it! Thanks again, -t
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Todd - I don't see anything in your frame worth shooting as far as subjects go - and the light too - not interesting. I would ask yourself first, what is really absolutely compelling about this view that makes me want to shoot it. I see a so-so flower arrangement on a table with a very cheap fabric draped over it, in the bg another cheap restaurant table base showing with a cheap fabric on it and a non-descript place setting, and beyond truck in the deep bg. It reads as a cheap an uninteresting room. I think first and foremost one has to consider the actual things... and what is actually in the frame. /B
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I guess I still find digital much different than film -- mainly in the pre area. The newer chips seem to handle the contrast a little better. I teach digital BUT: only how to shoot manually both focusing & exposure . We didn't have post sharpening in the film days....
Ansel taught quite a few of us around town < the ZONE System > (He & Virgina/kids > just lived down the street). I could go to Bretts and bug him about those blacks ..he would shoot without a meter when we walked Lobos -- he really taught me pre-visual ...do as much in the camera to save yourself post work.
Digital just doesn't actually lend itself to the ZONE processing ... its more like a transparency -- shoot for the highlights. It's just a new tool > but you can use some of the old tricks:[)
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Maybe I was a little drastic -- another crop
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To me, Cjogo's second crop emphasizes the patterns on leaf and tablecloths. Is that maybe what caught your attention in the first place?
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To me, Cjogo's second crop emphasizes the patterns on leaf and tablecloths. Is that maybe what caught your attention in the first place?
Exactly what I thought -- but the outdoors just distracted my eye -- liked the abstractness of the table/cloth
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I think we're back to two incompatible images in one photograph.
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Thanks for the candor Brandt. I will confess that none of those questions were asked when I shot it. But I am learning thanks to all you guys and your feedback. I enjoyed looking at your site. Nice. -t
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Thanks for your input Amolitor. That simple move would have changed everything that could and should have been changed in this photo. I enjoyed your blog and have added it to my read list. Your posting on January 1 sums up completely in better terms than I have been able to articulate my biggest hurdle right now:
"Most pictures are made today with a focus almost entirely on rendering. We worry about the lighting, the model's pose, the way the background looks. We worry about how to photoshop bad things out, and good things in. We worry about how to accomplish some visual effect or another." http://photothunk.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-process.html . Somewhere along the way I shifted some of the priority from taking a good photograph up front, to "making" good processing on a photo.
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Never let someone else worry about what you create.
While I agree with Russ that the moment of tripping the shutter is important, a shitty print can make an image look like...well, like shit. Shitty processing is fine for street shooters, they really don't care how the tones look. From what I have seen that you've posted here, you seem to like landscape. I'm sure Russ will groan but if you haven't read Adams' books the Camera, the Negative and the Print, do so. It will give you insight into the importance of processing, be it wet or "dry."
Thanks Ed B- I will re-visit the book to see if it helps me clarify my thinking.
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In post-processing, unless you were shooting at high ISO you almost always need a bit of sharpening. Sometimes you need to extend the tone curve a bit, and sometimes, if you had a difficult lighting situation you need to do a bit of color correction. But if you need to do more than that: crop, mess with the exposure, etc., you screwed up, and what you end up with is always going to be less than optimal.
Thanks Russ. Hard standards but true. That is the part of all this that I enjoy, not to imply I hit that mark often; more so in the past with film than now.
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Don't do it Todd! See above. You are making very rapid progress at getting good at processing... just go back and look at some of your early efforts you posted here versus what you are doing now.
Ed- Thanks for the encouragement. I appreciate! -t
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Thanks Russ. Hard standards but true. That is the part of all this that I enjoy, not to imply I hit that mark often; more so in the past with film than now.
I rarely shoot with my digital. ( Just portraiture )
Have years of negs to scan. Also I am coming from a world of little post processing. Film and the Zone System ( and Ansels books ) just made everything easier for the final print.
Many now shoot and think " I will fix that in Photoshop " Totally different world ....
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I grew up on Adams's books, Ed. In film days I did a lot of Adams-type shooting with a 4 x 5 view camera. I was way into the zone system. Sometimes I even modified my developer chemistry in accordance with the stuff in Ansel's books.
But, bottom line: what matters is subject and technique. Capture technique; not post-processing technique. If what you're shooting is crap, if your exposure is off, or if your composition is lousy, you can do all the frantic post-processing you want to do and it won't help. I ROTFL when I read somebody supposedly "teaching" photography (an impossibility on the face of it) tell his readers that you should go out and shoot and if you examine the result you can find many pictures within the shot. If you can do that, you're screwed. You blew it. You didn't know what you were doing. I have a friend who enjoys working on his pictures on his computer a lot more than he enjoys shooting the pictures in the first place. He does things like making people smile who weren't smiling, opening eyes that were closed., etc. He sometimes can fool the ignorant, but anybody with eyes to see can detect the fakery.
In post-processing, unless you were shooting at high ISO you almost always need a bit of sharpening. Sometimes you need to extend the tone curve a bit, and sometimes, if you had a difficult lighting situation you need to do a bit of color correction. But if you need to do more than that: crop, mess with the exposure, etc., you screwed up, and what you end up with is always going to be less than optimal.
There are exceptions. Ansel's Moonrise Over Hernandez is an example. When he made that shot he knew exactly what he was after, but the lighting conditions could only give him the framework of what he later had to bring out in the darkroom. Nonetheless, his framing and exposure, even though he had to guess at the exposure, were good. If they hadn't been, if Ansel hadn't had an artist's eye, Moonrise never would have seen the light of day.
I don't disagree that capture is important and I did agree with you on that point in my previous post. And I also agree that no amount of processing is going to make a shitty photograph good. However, the right processing can make a good image better, dare I say magical. Adams' images may have been well composed and exposed but without his processing skill I don't think they would have been magical. His exposures were tied to his processing, developing the negs was just the first step in processing that got him closer to what he wanted reflected in his prints.
I'm not as rigid as you when it comes to cropping but it is something I strive to avoid. I'm not opposed to small crops if it is unavoidable during capture but when it comes to large crops, I agree that the image was missed during capture. Relying on cropping to improve an image is poor technique.
As someone who loves B&W (especially landscape) I believe that capture and processing are forever tied together. One without the other makes it incomplete, imho. I see many images on the web that have great compositions but a lot of them are poorly processed, be it flat, too much contrast, overzealous vignetting, and a myriad of other problems. I'm not sure about you but I wouldn't hang something like that on my wall.
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"In post-processing, unless you were shooting at high ISO you almost always need a bit of sharpening"
Why is this ?? Many of us have fought with Canon -- for years. Sending lenses back and forth -- calibrating bodies to lens... etc. Did technology move too fast in the digital world ??
I still hand focus every shot > just never have trusted the auto system of today's DSLR . With a SLR on a tripod -- manual focused -- there was no post sharping ??
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Forgotten your name, cjogo, but hi, cjogo,
If you're going to switch from film to digital you need to do your homework. The need for minimal sharpening has nothing to do with the steadiness of the camera or accuracy of focus. For starters, check Jeff Schewe's PDF piece you can find at: http://www.pixelgenius.com/tips/schewe-sharpening.pdf. There's plenty more out there on the subject, and there are some good books. I'd even recommend Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom. It's from 2009 and incorporated a bunch of wisdom from Bruce Fraser as well as from Jeff. The book's a bit long-in-the-tooth now, but still an important read.
The reason I excluded high-iso images is that at high iso there may be enough noise that you don't want to emphasize it by sharpening. You still may need a bit of capture sharpening, though.
Oh, and there never was post sharpening with film unless you were going to do the unsharp mask thing.
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Forgotten your name, cjogo, but hi, cjogo,
If you're going to switch from film to digital you need to do your homework. The need for minimal sharpening has nothing to do with the steadiness of the camera or accuracy of focus. For starters, check Jeff Schewe's PDF piece you can find at: http://www.pixelgenius.com/tips/schewe-sharpening.pdf. There's plenty more out there on the subject, and there are some good books. I'd even recommend Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom. It's from 2009 and incorporated a bunch of wisdom from Bruce Fraser as well as from Jeff. The book's a bit long-in-the-tooth now, but still an important read.
The reason I excluded high-iso images is that at high iso there may be enough noise that you don't want to emphasize it by sharpening. You still may need a bit of capture sharpening, though.
Oh, and there never was post sharpening with film unless you were going to do the unsharp mask thing.
Switched over a long time back -- been using digital since the Canon 20d days. Still did not understand the digital capture chip -- and why we were not getting sharp images. Kept sending our lens to Canon Pro -- and they would send us new ones.....must have been an alignment coupling of the lens to body. Even after manual focusing -- just was not tack sharp ?? And we do this commercially -- just unacceptable.
You just have to handpick your lens and do a lot of research > ( stay away from the 17-40mm ;-[ ) Went through 4 of those...
Still rarely move above ISO 500 -- just not a noise guy...
Use a combination of Smart Sharpen ...for images these days.
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Something to keep in mind that with virtually all sensor chips in use today, there is a Bayer Array to produce color information. This method quite explicitly trades resolution for color information.
The result is that when you pixel-peep, you ALWAYS have more pixels lying around than there is resolution in the final picture. It will ALWAYS "look blurry" if you dig in far enough. The Bayer Array trades roughly half of your sensor's resolution for color information, so your 24 megapixel sensor produces, roughly, 12 megapixels of color picture. This is invariably delivered to you in the form of a 24 megapixel file.
This is a good thing, for the camera makers, because it keeps the gear-heads strapped to the wheel. They'll continually pixel-peep, buy better glass, buy a new body, buy, buy, buy, chasing a chimera that is mathematically impossible. And thank goodness, those guys fund the R&D that builds the gear I want!
The exceptions are b&w sensors and the Foveon design from Sigma, as far as I know, and those are pretty thin on the ground.
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I don't know -- like a analog camera with a simple lens -- no brainer -- just pick it up --focus and its sharp. You'd think the tech guys could reproduce that simpleness :-)
Well sent back enough lenses and complained to Canon enough .. found the smaller sensors to work better ..especially edge to edge sharpness. 60d with 17-50mm 2.8 for 90 % of my work --shoot between f6.7 and 13.5 delivers a decent image ...
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Gelatin-silver has its own built-in softness, just like digital has. At least in digital you can do something about it.