Asher Kelman said:
Well, greetings Mary, glad to meet you in person at last!
Even with the blown highlights on my face, huh?
I confess, as you probably have already observed, that I processed my nephew's photo a bit also, including cropping off woodland on either side.
All these images were taken with difficult light. The sun declining toward the southwest, the dense woodland casting deep shade even over the lake.
What the camera caught every time was much darker in the case of my own snapshot portrait, and in regard to the water in the shots I made, and much lighter, almost washed-out, in regard to the tree leaves, which caught the harsh sunlight.
However, my nephew had promised to go with his wife to a political rally at 5:00 p.m., Central Daylight Time. So we couldn't wait for me to have the sunset light. It's magical--throws violet shadows across the water.
Additionally, it really was getting very cold, and we were having trouble keeping my sister warm, on the shady path in the cold wind.
So I tried to invent, with my crude skills, what my eye remembered seeing, on a base of what the G2 handed me.
The first picture you too[k] of Radnor lake is the best you have taken so far, (except perhaps your shadow of you shooting the girl going by with the knapsack on her back).
I am glad to hear this. I do like the lake from this vantage point.
However, the light had washed out the foliage. And as you note, I did over-process it. Although I stayed off the sharpening tool, the saturation alone was enough to make the appearance un-natural.
It's all big lesson-learning, for me. "Every day's a schoolday."
This is what I like.
1. The scene is beautiful and interesting.
2. It looks like a unity of concept, one subject, one scene, one subject matter, one focus of attention.
3. The is a wonderful array of colors, browns and yellos, gold and green and blue water. The reflections in the water add to this.
4. The composition is good. Our eyes are satisfactorily blocked to left and right so we are not missing more of the scene. There is an horizontal shadow in the water which nicely anchorse the botton of the frame. The foregound foliage cuts into the picture and provides a reference to gauge the scale of distance and depth in the picture. The background is divided into assymetrical pleasing layers, creating interest as to what is in and between these features.
The colors, as noted above, are more muted on the cliffside than I made them, although not so muted to my eyes in my glasses, only to the camera's output to my computer screen.
And the water darker, so that it was my processing that brought the shadow and reflections in the water out. Although, novice that I still am, I can see that I overdid it considerably.
Problems:
1. Color it looks like you may have tweaked this too much or your monitor is not right. I suggest that you shoot one jpg as a reference with auto white balance so you can have something to match to.
Yes, overtweaking is the culprit. In every case, I warmed the temperature with the white balance tool, trying to find the colors I knew were there in the soft focus and pale tones the original, untweaked image showed me.
You really need a Whi-bal to make sure you have no unwanted color cast!
The color cast is one I put there myself, with the LightZone white balance tool, which offers not only temperature warming but tint adjustment.
In fact I'm going to award you a WhiBal (courtesy of Michael Tapes). Include it in your next picture and click on it in your rasw developer with the eye dropper tool for grey balance.
Thanks, Asher. I haven't figured out how to do that eye-dropper thing.
It's the reason I'm running LightZone v. 1.62 and not the beta 2.0. I'm doing everything with sliders--except what little I manage with the Regions tools in Lightzone.
The picture of Lake Radnor from the bend in the path had the sky completely blown out above the hills, as well as all the foliage pale in shades of yellow.
I dealt with the foliage colors as described above. For the sky, I defined a region and warmed it up to that greenish-blue (the best blue I could get, although still unsatisfactory) in the LightZone hue-saturation-luminosity tool.
Bottom line, the light was just not right for the camera lens, for what I wanted to achieve.
We may have one more good weekend next Saturday, and Scott has promised to take us out again. I'll try to persuade him to leave me out there until sunset--maybe he and Wanda can go get a hamburger and come back for me about dusk. < she said smiling >
Right now, I'd rather shoot pictures than eat!!
PM me your address and I'll send you a card as an award for your great progrress and effort. Thanks Michael Tapes!
Will do. Many thanks to you both.
2. You may have increased the saturation a little too much.
Most definitely.
I haven't printed any of these yet. Well, I did print the one of myself and the one I took of my nephew and my sister together, and took those over to my sister.
I think I'll PM that jpeg to you. It came out from the camera as if it had been shot at night! I wasn't using flash. I had the same settings as the ones where I had just photographed the lake from the bridge. But my nephew and sister are dim and the surrounding background is black, with the "handicapped" and "parking" signs, in blue and red lettering respectively, blazng out like white stars on a moonless night. Amazing.
Otherwise, I like the image very much and if you work further, you will have a nice print!
Would you like to play with it yourself? I can attach the RAW files, or else the DNG, in a private e-mail to you, if you would like them. Or else, I could upload them to yousendit.
The other pictures now you can critique yourself by seeing what factors I have mentioned do or don't have characteristics of the first.
Ignoring color, saturation and sharpening, if the first landscape scored a 7 out of 10 then the second would be 2 and the third would be 4 (merely to my apprecation and esthetics).
Keep going,
Thanks a mil for your time and for your welcome comments, Asher.
I shot 300 frames on Saturday--14 of them the new mushrooms that have made their appearance in the place where the lawnmower got the first ones.
The other 286 I shot at the lake. Woodland views. A tall cottonwood, bare of leaves, that reminded me of the birch you wanted someone to show you. Macros of berries and tiny asters and a large oak gall. And dozens and dozens of shots of Lake Radnor itself.
I got the departing back of a small boy going downhill on a bicycle. Totally anonymous and unrecognizable from the back, but of course I can't use it. Took it on account of your "boy with a bike." My boy's bike was red.
Mary
