Green with envy over your beautiful photos

Topics covering photography and videography of the flora, fauna and landscape of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Show off your talent. Post your photos and videos here!
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fishmonger
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Re: Green with envy over your beautiful photos

Post by fishmonger »

John Dittli wrote: Image quality was never about the body, but about the glass. That's all changed a bit hasn't it?
sure has. I would have loved for that time to come 10 years earlier, because back in the 90s I spent $600 per weekend on film and processing. Buys you a lot of high end digital bodies in a hurry. Except back then the high end digital was 1.5MP and cost $13,500 and no art director would even touch a digital "original" even for a 1" sized frame in print.

Now it's both - body and lens, and the choices have become confusing with all the sensor sizes, RAW bit depths, etc... One thing has stayed the same: the most expensive stuff usually is still the best :D
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maverick
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Re: Green with envy over your beautiful photos

Post by maverick »

It still is about the lenses in a lot of cases.
With only 2 bodies from Canon that go over 20 mp's, 1 from Sony, and 1 from Nikon
choices are not abundant for those of us who wish to print 24x36 and larger, unless
you stitch, but you cannot stitch in some circumstances, or go medium format, and
then prices go through the roof plus added weight, though Pentax has the new 645 D
for around $10000(40 mp).
I have read of a few people uprezzing there 8 mp images to sizes up to 24x36 with
great success, though I have not seen these photo's or prints.
So maybe Nikon's line of 12 mp camera's are more than adequate, or Canon's 7D
with it's 18 mp may be suffice for some, but only you the photographer can judge
there print/image quality according to there(and there customers) standards.
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John Dittli
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Re: Green with envy over your beautiful photos

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Ya, tell me about it! I've got 35 years and 100,000 transparencies invested in a profession (photographic stock) that basically no longer exists (as a profession). Now editors won't look at film. Am I going to scan all those images? Nope.

JD
Walk the Sky: Following the John Muir Trail
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fishmonger
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Re: Green with envy over your beautiful photos

Post by fishmonger »

John Dittli wrote:Ya, tell me about it! I've got 35 years and 100,000 transparencies invested in a profession (photographic stock) that basically no longer exists (as a profession). Now editors won't look at film. Am I going to scan all those images? Nope.

JD
I have about 20,000 motorsports slides sitting here waiting to be scanned, and I think I will do that one of these cold boring winters. Batch feeders are getting pretty expensive since Nikon stopped making these things, so I better make up my mind soon.
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Re: Green with envy over your beautiful photos

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I bet I can easily capture better small images with a cheap few megapixel compact digital camera and small tripod than 95% percent of camera toters regardless of the amount of gear they are lugging. So gear is not the important part of the equation at least initially but rather technique, experience with one's gear, and understanding and study of light in nature. One must invest some time understanding how to capture images and how to use their often complicated digital cameras and post processing photo applications in order to have good results. Unfortunately the vast majority of camera users don't although nearly all serious photographers do which in this day are many. One doesn't need to take some expensive course but rather simply buy any of the dozens of how to guides and actually read them and their camera manuals.

One of the prime faults of ordinary camera users is they don't understand how film or sensors capture light so they often point at contrasty subjects. As Galen Rowell emphasized, film (or digitial sensor) does not react like the human eye as the contrast range is significantly lower. So what looks good through one's eye will not necessarily be a good subject to try and capture. And they often aim their cameras in auto mode at wrong contrasty directions resulting in ugly shadows and blown highlights. Another common misunderstanding is the nature of depth of field. Thus amateurs often have considerable out of focus zones and elements in their image results that are not aesthetic. Finally few amateurs use a tripod causing blurry results for anything but small web sized pics.

Generally no one that shoots digital images, posts results right out of a camera without processsing. In my own case I purposely adjust my G10 for underexposure and undersaturation in order to be able to capture subjects without blown highlights or weird color so I can post process an image for results that have better fidelity to what I actually experienced with my eyes. As to your comment about image enhancements and maniputations post processing, it is true that 95% of more serious photographers today included those on this board have embraced manipulations and have little interest presenting images that have fidelity to what they saw with their eyes. However there are some of us whose style is still in presenting images that are reasonably accurate representations of 2-dimensional frames of what our eyes experienced. Although some of my images would look better if I jacked up contrast, increased saturation, changed hues, and cloned out awkward elements etc, long before the current generation of photogs, I learned to take top landscape images without having to resort to such even if that takes more time and effort.

David
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Re: Green with envy over your beautiful photos

Post by mokelumnekid »

"Color enhancement filters? Photoshopping to bring out colors?"

There is so much over-sugared crap out there- that any real Sierra traveler knows is not the real bark-'n' weave of Nature....Ugh, double ugh. Lower the net far enough and it stops being special....and becomes Sierra porn IMHO.
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Re: Green with envy over your beautiful photos

Post by rlown »

what i see and what i get from my Olympus P&S, pretty much says it all.. this was really close to what i saw on my last trip:
reality.jpg
Filters are for professionals.. nothing bad intended there.. I don't retouch my photos. But, i don't sell them, either..

Russ
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John Dittli
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Re: Green with envy over your beautiful photos

Post by John Dittli »

mokelumnekid wrote:"Color enhancement filters? Photoshopping to bring out colors?"

There is so much over-sugared crap out there- that any real Sierra traveler knows is not the real bark-'n' weave of Nature....Ugh, double ugh. Lower the net far enough and it stops being special....and becomes Sierra **** IMHO.
Couldn't agree more, Kid. The interesting thing about the mis-conceptions of "photoshopped" is that it is inherently bad; it's just another tool, when used properly it allows for more "accurate" renditions of subject matter then film ever did. What many people don't understand, is that when they click the shutter on their digital camera, they are capturing electrons. Those electrons are then being "photoshopped" in their camera by software created by some engineer in Japan that has never seen the Sierra, and spit out as a finished jpeg.

Like film, those jpeg files can vary in color and contrast from camera to camera (remember Velvia next to Kodachrome?); film wasn't/isn't true either. This is one of the reason pros like to shoot "raw" images. Beside having more information, they have not been "manipulated" by software. But raw files are not representative of the original scene; they are flat in contrast and dull in color. But then, they must be "Photoshopped"

So this is where it get's interesting. Trying to create an image that accurately represents the scene as you remember it. It has been shown, time and time again, that the human memory is, shall we say, dynamic. Given the task to re-create the same scene weeks later, two people are very likely to create dissimilar representations. Oh, and speaking of inaccurate representations; the greatest American landscape photographer of the 20th century, that guy did nothing but mis-represent reality; unless of course ones reality is black and white!

With that said, those of us that have spent years, decades, lifetimes, living and working outside, have a pretty good idea of what does and can, happen out there. I think many of us do our best to keep that perspective. Is the final image a 100% accurate representation of what actually occurred? In photography, as in other visual arts, it never has been and probably never will be. I don't care how good you are, it will always be a representation (was the water really that shade of blue? or was it 10% more cyan? Sunset more red or less magenta).

In the end, it is if that representation is true to you as an artist. Or if your a pro, true or not, are your client going to like it! That last statement may be a sell out, but it's also a reality. I held on to Kodachrome until my clients insisted on the saturated colors of Velvia. Then I held onto film way to long, and for the same reason, forced into digital.

It is important to remember that photography is art, and that art goes through stages, radical stages with the introduction of new mediums i.e. digital photography. I recon the period of over done photography will fade at some point, and it will be looked upon like the psychedelic art of the sixties.

Just my 2 bucks worth

JD
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Re: Green with envy over your beautiful photos

Post by GH-Dave »

Hello everyone,

I've made good use of time since my last post on this thread. The big news is that I ordered my new Canon EOS Rebel T1i with the kit lens.

In the meantime, while waiting for my new camera to arrive, I've done quite a lot of browsing on photography websites soaking up tips on how to take good landscape shots. A lot is coming back to me from my days of using a semi-auto film SLR -- depth of field, exposures, focal length, etc., all the things that I haven't had to deal with since using point and shoots.

One of the most interesting things I ran across has turned out to be one of the most controversial -- HDR photography. Not surprisingly, the HDR technique figures heavily in shots that are high up there in the "wow" factor.

So, with HDR in mind, I performed an experiment the other morning. I borrowed my daughter's little point and shoot camera, set it up on a tripod, and took some shots of the sun shining through the trees on the morning mist over the lake behind our house. It turned out about how I expected ... highlights blown out, foreground too dark, with nowhere near the almost surreal effect that I was seeing with my eyes.

Then, I took a series of three shots: one bracketing 2 exposure levels higher and one 2 exposure levels lower, and one normal. I then ran these shots through several HDR software packages that are available to download. The best one, no surprise, was produced by Photomatix. It came out looking much more like what I had seen with my eyes.

There is no question that the post-processing technique of HDR that is so derided among some purist photo circles produced the most realistic shot for me.

Anyway, this is just what I'm occupying my time with while I'm waiting (patiently) for my new camera to arrive. :)

Dave
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Re: Green with envy over your beautiful photos

Post by mokelumnekid »

Hey JD- I agree completely- well said! Sorry my little shotgun rant didn't say much, and you said it well. (I understand the whole thing about electrons and optical physics and digital signal processing, but we'll remove that from the equation for the moment).

No doubt the essential tension between what you rightfully describe as, "With that said, those of us that have spent years, decades, lifetimes, living and working outside, have a pretty good idea of what does and can, happen out there" and what is pure hyped romanticism, is debated in the professional community. In fact at some level the integrity of the work depends on the base level of *craft* that passes muster. I am a glassblower, and that is a craft intensive enterprise (like music say) and either one has put in the hours or they haven't- the time domain in which the art is created is finite and in the moment- no post-processing. So these kinds of debates don't come up. And being art- what are the 'rules' if there are any? Tinkering with the filtering and color saturation of a photo does not rise to the same creative bar as taking the original representational image and making something that really transcends it. Instead we get pictures that are basically dolled-up versions of what is there. Is that art? I dunno- that gets slippery in a hurry- but I'd love to see someone take say, Sierra images and use them to transmit something other than what could pass for album art on a new age music cd ;-) Or calendar pics in that free calendar my real estate leaves on my porch. I am purposefully being provocative of course-

I just had a knee-jerk response to all the "magic hour" stuff out there where in fact (as an old hand like you knows) the really magic hours are few and far between, and the *artist* who works hard to get them, like you and others- Maverick too- finds their work in a marketplace of competing stuff that was cooked-up. For example some of my favorite work of yours are not the "premium" images, but rather the ones that you post as more informal (like the ice skating work) where I can see your skill in subject, composition and framing. My favorites of Maverick's images are the b&w.

But that's just me yammering on- I sure appreciate what you all do- trying to keep it real. Just saying.
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