[Hetan]

I have moved this topic as you can see and created a sub-forum under the ART Category.

[cauthon]

Hetan, on 24 September 2009 - 06:12 AM, said:

I have moved this topic as you can see and created a sub-forum under the ART Category.

Sweet! We thank you, dear mistress.

[cauthon]

Reflection in the wheel dop of an original Volkswagen Beetle.





Taken using a Canon 450D, with a Canon 50mm EF f/1.8 II objective at f/2.8, 1/4000 exposure, -1.3EV.

This post has been edited by cauthon: 28 September 2009 - 11:19 AM

[Hetan]

It's not as clear as I would like it, but I liked the fire impression

 flower.png (1.06MB)
Number of downloads: 1

[Hetan]

A visitor to our garden.

 Dragonfly2.png (1.08MB)
Number of downloads: 1

[Binder of Demons]

nice images Hetan,
Sadly, i have never managed to see a dragonfly that close when i've had my camera with me.
And those are some seriously vibrant colours on the flower.


I notice that you have saved the images as .png format. Considering the bandwidth and memory issues which led to the end of the hawt girls thread, it might be better to make all posts in the photography thread jpg's where possible (since that is what the jpg file format was designed for, compressing photos).
The .png format is better suited for graphics or images with text in them (also it is a lossless format so file sizes are bigger).

A quick example is that your flower image is ~1mb, while cauthon's hubcap image just above (with bigger dimensions) is only 200kb. I only really noticed since my internet connection was very slow at the time and it was taking a while for your pics to load, which made me curius enough to check their properties.

Just a thought while we're ironing out the kinks in this as a new thread/sub-forum.

Cheers.

[cauthon]

Binder of Demons, on 29 September 2009 - 08:31 AM, said:

A quick example is that your flower image is ~1mb, while cauthon's hubcap image just above (with bigger dimensions) is only 200kb.

Mine is stored on flickr, so should impose no burden on the server, other than to serve the URL, which is less than 100 bytes ;-)

[Binder of Demons]

Ok, here are a few older pics of mine that are online so they're easy to post here (rather than uploading them). Sorry they're so small.

A shot of my dog back in Ireland


Practicing wildlife shots down the local pond


Trying out a shot or two in the lab, more for abstract images, colours and shapes


A couple of aikido shots



I'll try and dig up some more recent shots to post here. My hard drive died a few weeks ago, and my back ups are all over the place (i think i lost most of the handy web sized images i had).

Lesson, have a decent filing system, and have back-ups!

This post has been edited by Binder of Demons: 30 September 2009 - 12:50 PM

[cauthon]

The dog shot is pretty cool.

[Hetan]

Binder of Demons, on 29 September 2009 - 08:31 AM, said:

nice images Hetan,
Sadly, i have never managed to see a dragonfly that close when i've had my camera with me.
And those are some seriously vibrant colours on the flower.


I notice that you have saved the images as .png format. Considering the bandwidth and memory issues which led to the end of the hawt girls thread, it might be better to make all posts in the photography thread jpg's where possible (since that is what the jpg file format was designed for, compressing photos).
The .png format is better suited for graphics or images with text in them (also it is a lossless format so file sizes are bigger).

A quick example is that your flower image is ~1mb, while cauthon's hubcap image just above (with bigger dimensions) is only 200kb. I only really noticed since my internet connection was very slow at the time and it was taking a while for your pics to load, which made me curius enough to check their properties.

Just a thought while we're ironing out the kinks in this as a new thread/sub-forum.

Cheers.

cauthon, on 29 September 2009 - 12:42 PM, said:

Binder of Demons, on 29 September 2009 - 08:31 AM, said:

A quick example is that your flower image is ~1mb, while cauthon's hubcap image just above (with bigger dimensions) is only 200kb.

Mine is stored on flickr, so should impose no burden on the server, other than to serve the URL, which is less than 100 bytes ;-)

Excellent points - thank you both of you. I automatically saved them as .png's because that is what I've been having to do to post images to the website front page and didn't even think. I'll remove the images and replace them with .jpg's when I get back from holiday. I'll also think about re-opening my photobucket account and using that in future. Really appreciate your comments.

[Puck]

Well, I'm no good at taking photos, but I took a stroll through the forest surrounding the academy I'm starting at on Monday, and it's just a freaking beautiful place.. Thought of taking pictures too late [that is, only when I was back at the castle], though, and did so with my mobile, so whatever, there you go..

This post has been edited by Puck: 06 October 2009 - 07:24 PM

[Binder of Demons]

Looks like a lovely setting. What kind of "academy" is it, if you don't mind me asking?

[bubba]

Some resent stuff

Canon Power Shot SD990 IS
14.7MP all pics are seriously down sized. Each pic is over 5M

 flr.jpg (34.72K)
Number of downloads: 0
 cata.jpg (29.8K)
Number of downloads: 0
 fgy.jpg (57.97K)
Number of downloads: 0
 Lizard.jpg (25.74K)
Number of downloads: 0
 spdy.jpg (32.44K)
Number of downloads: 0
 sdy2.jpg (25.28K)
Number of downloads: 0
 jelly.jpg (35.35K)
Number of downloads: 0
 jelly 2.jpg (46.92K)
Number of downloads: 0
 prawn.jpg (37.16K)
Number of downloads: 0

[Puck]

Binder of Demons, on 07 October 2009 - 12:35 AM, said:

Looks like a lovely setting. What kind of "academy" is it, if you don't mind me asking?

Of course I don't mind, it's a private art academy.

[Tiste Simeon]

You guys are great!

I, unfortunately am not so good but my girlfriend is a professional photographer, so she has helped me to take some nice ones. This one is from the front door of my house on the Isle of Man, taken with a Canon 50D.

[Binder of Demons]

@ tiste - Looks like a lovely spot. Must be plenty of great photo opportunities around there by the looks of things.

I really like the sky in this shot, and I think the image overall could be improved with a little bit of photoshop. If you carefully made a selection of the sky, you could alter the levels, and make the sky darker (which would enhance the colour too). If you then make a separate selection of the foreground (say the treeline up to the waters edge) you can use levels again, to brighten things. It's a bit of a balancing act, but when the exposure levels are closer together, you will end up with much punchier colours throughout the image, and you'll find your eye stays in the frame much easier.

I hope you don't mind, but I did a very quick (and terribly crude) manipulation of your image to show what i mean. The small size of the image, means that you can see the edges of the areas i altered (that halo on the horizon). It would be much easier to do, and much less noticeable on the original full size jpeg, and better again if it was a raw file (which would keep all the tonal range).

I'd love to see more of your images from there.

Out of curiosity, what kind of photography does your girlfriend do? Commercial, wedding, photojournalism?

Attached File(s)

•  IMG_5546-fix.jpg (41.13K)
  Number of downloads: 0

[alt146]

Unfortunately I couldn't (and still can't) afford to have more than a passing interest in photography, decent cameras are very expensive Still, I agree that a good eye is more important than a good camera, playing with shutter speeds and f-stops doesn't guarantee a good photo. Especially with the quality of point and shoot cameras now days.

A bit of subtle photoshop doesnt hurt either

Anyway, here are some photos I took with my girlfriend's camera a while back. Sorry bout the size, I've already scaled them down quite a lot.

Attached File(s)

•  upload4.JPG (627.63K)
  Number of downloads: 0
•  upload3.JPG (359.66K)
  Number of downloads: 0
•  upload2.JPG (262.23K)
  Number of downloads: 0
•  upload1.JPG (423.48K)
  Number of downloads: 0

[Tiste Simeon]

Binder of Demons, on 20 October 2009 - 04:14 PM, said:

@ tiste - Looks like a lovely spot. Must be plenty of great photo opportunities around there by the looks of things.

I really like the sky in this shot, and I think the image overall could be improved with a little bit of photoshop. If you carefully made a selection of the sky, you could alter the levels, and make the sky darker (which would enhance the colour too). If you then make a separate selection of the foreground (say the treeline up to the waters edge) you can use levels again, to brighten things. It's a bit of a balancing act, but when the exposure levels are closer together, you will end up with much punchier colours throughout the image, and you'll find your eye stays in the frame much easier.

I hope you don't mind, but I did a very quick (and terribly crude) manipulation of your image to show what i mean. The small size of the image, means that you can see the edges of the areas i altered (that halo on the horizon). It would be much easier to do, and much less noticeable on the original full size jpeg, and better again if it was a raw file (which would keep all the tonal range).

I'd love to see more of your images from there.

Out of curiosity, what kind of photography does your girlfriend do? Commercial, wedding, photojournalism?

OK, so I have tried to work on Photoshop I just don't get it. My girlfriend knows a lot more about it, and has CS4 on her Mac. In fact I think that picture was touched up ever so slightly, but only a five minute jobbie for Facebook...

She is a graphic designer and photographer, so she kind of does a bunch of stuff. She used to work for a graphic design agency which was connected to a small theatre here in Cardiff, so she took a bunch of shots of dancers etc. She has also done a lot of portrait work, and is currently training in an advanced wedding photography course. She's only one year out of uni so hasn't really settled into one corner of the market yet, but does a lot. She has been paid to take shots of flowers for a hospital to put up around the place.

I have more decent shots from the Isle of Man, but I didn't take any of them hence why I only put the one up. Here are a couple of my favourites anyway...
This one has been touched up a lot because it was a pretty bright sun reflecting off the clouds...

Here are two from the same place as before but at a different time. I don't know what Photoshop work has been done on these. Fairly poor quality though because I'm hotlinking across from Facebook...



And here is one I did take of my brother on his Canon 350D (I think...)

[Binder of Demons]

@ Tiste - I know what you mean about Photoshop. It can be a major pain in the @ss to get it to work right without spending ages at times. As an amateur wildlife photographer, i have an aversion to manipulating my images in any way, so i try to use photoshop as little as possible. As a result i'm not really that skilled with it. And landscape images are one of the trickiest things to get right, since there can be so many conflicting elements, so any advice i give is from experience with my own struggles at getting good landscape shots.

With your landscape shot that i manipulated, you can see though how a bit of work can really brighten the image. The problem is that there is too great of a range between the brightest part and the darkest part of the image, which is why the foreground looked dark, while the sky looked washed out. Traditionally, a landscape photographer would have used a graduated filter to balance the light difference between the upper and lower halves of the image (a grad filter is basically a piece of glass which is half clear/half darkened glass which goes in front of your lens). The advantage of digital photography is that you don't need the grad filter, but can either do some fancy photoshop work on your single image, or combine multiple images to get a better dynamic range (i'm still not any good with combining images).

If you are taking a landscape image in tricky lighting conditions, it may be worthwhile to shoot the image in RAW format, as this will allow you to manipulate the image afterward with far more control. Also, shoot on the lowest ISO setting possible, as this will give far greater detail, and tonal range, and survive manipulation better as well. There is a balancing act when it comes to getting the exposure right in this case. In general with a digital image, it is better to slightly underexpose, than to overexpose. This is because you can usually recover some detail from the shadows if you underexpose, but if you overexpose an image, it is often impossible to recover any detail from the highlights.

On your camera you can usually fix the settings so that it will give you a warning on the screen when you've overexposed the image (flashing highlights). you can then dial in the correct amount of exposure correction and take the image again. The first and last 2 hours of daylight are the best times to shoot landscape generally, as there is more colour in the sky when the sun is lower, and the dynamic range isn't as great as the middle of the day. Shooting in the middle of the day, when the sun is higher in the sky gives you the harshest light, and often casts strong shadows which can spoil an image.

Hope this doesn't sound too preachy. That location looks like it's great for getting nice landscape shots, especially with those interesting cloud formations coming up over the headland. Love that last image too of your brother jumping. I remember you posting a couple of those "big jump" images before.

Hope your girlfriend enjoys the wedding photography course. That's a tough gig. I've done a couple of weddings for friends (under duress!) and they were the most nerve wracking experiences of my life. But since she's already doing portrait stuff I'm sure she'll be fine.

[caladanbrood]

Now there is a seperate sub-forum for photography, might it be nicer to have seperate topics for each category - nature, animal, architecture, human, etc?