OpenC

Just back here after a period away. Thanks a lot for the additional comments @Ricochetrider and @MrAndMrsIzzy , they're very much appreciated. Apologies if there's a forum rule about bumping old threads with no new content, I won't be offended if this is deleted :)

I used an X100S for years and found it alarmingly easy to miss a lot of its warnings (when it was going to overexpose, most notably, but also when I had forgotten to turn the ND back off afterwards). That may be part of it, and I suspect another part may be how easy it is to acquire focus properly but inadvertently move before releasing the shutter, which shows up very clearly in close work like this. I tended to use burst mode and take a few just in case my critical focus was off due to a slightly wobbly hand.

Quite so; with a little experience it's not too difficult or expensive to pick up the equipment and technique required to make an image like this and it does get seductive, you find yourself thinking that nothing will be good enough without that bit of blurred movement or that just-so pushing of the image in post. A perfectly natural looking but still compelling photograph is perhaps becoming a rare thing indeed, in the age of Instagram and snapseed. I personally blame HDR, it all started to go wrong when people gave up on contrast altogether for a while. Will definitely reflect on that post too, thanks :)

No indeed, it's a very fair point you make and one I had never considered before (which is exactly what critique is for, and exactly what I was looking for). It's the opposite of gilding the lily, I guess: dramatising the dramatic. Overwrought passion is something I try to avoid, and I hadn't even considered it in photography until the last 20 minutes. I really appreciate you (and others) taking the time.

Thanks Sam The b&w is in no small part due to my extremely defective colour vision, but I know what you mean - a high contrast treatment like this adds a bit of drama that's not strictly necessary given the scene. I might work up a colour version (I usually compensate for my colour vision by desaturating orange, yellow and green channels by around 20%, just in case they're overdone and I haven't realised - I leave the reds alone because everybody likes red and it's very rarely a dominant colour). The second had much less thought given to it because i didn't like it as much, and your criticisms are absolutely fair ones. The first one is almost exactly the shot I set out to take, which is nice (and quite rare for me). The sea is always used as a feature in shots of this castle, I was interested to see how it would fare with an interesting sky instead.

Thanks again, by the way. This is all useful to me. My years of street photography spoiled my compositional eye a bit, it's proving difficult to recover. My technical chops have improved, but all the technique in the world won't fix a dull image :)

Yes, I think the second is a little too generic, a viewpoint I've seen dozens or hundreds of times. It's a great location, though, and right on my doorstep, so maybe I'm just overfamiliar by now, but yes, I also prefer the first image. Dust is always more of an issue when you're working with big washes of tones like this, I find. It's not so much that it's really bad, it's just extremely visible against skies like these.

Hey all Thanks a lot, appreciate the feedback. The low viewpoint was a stylistic choice as the low hill this castle sits on is not so very interesting, unfortunately. I wondered if the increasingly out of focus foreground would attract comment. My original crop was indeed much more panoramic and contained very little grass (and my second contained only the sharper grass) but I actually found the image less interesting that way, so I thought I'd go with almost the full frame just to see what sort of comment it received (so thanks for the feedback). @mikemorrell: yes, it's the first time I've really tried the stacking technique properly. I've done it for star trails before but for some reason I'd never considered using it to make it easier to do daytime long exposures too. I do love a "real" superlong exposure but the apertures required cause havoc with dust (this was shot at f/4 which goes a long way toward explaining the out of focus grass at the front). Additionally with this technique, you know your exposure is going to be right and you can really just leave your intervalometer clicking away for as long as you like. I post this next partly as a companion piece but mostly for context - I don't like this one as much, but you can see the slope underneath the castle which I was on when I took the one I posted - there isn't a great deal of interest there. This one was also shot telephoto at around f/9 and immediately displays more issues with dust.

Very close :)

First post. I hope I'm doing it right.. My colour vision is appalling so I'm naturally drawn to black and white, and I try hard to work to the principles of black and white meaning exactly that, rather than just mostly grey. Interested in people's thoughts on this one; it's around 15 or 16 stacked 30 second exposures to create an effective 7 or 8 minute period. Black sky is a result of knocking down the blue channel in a faux-infra-red style.

Thanks a lot :) You're right, we're a bit more rural and ruinous than that. I used an X100S for years, the built in ND meaning that I could get 13 stops reduction with just a tiny cheap 10 stop ND filter was inspirational for me and got me interested in extreme long exposures. Moving back to interchangeable lenses meant heavier duty filters, which is fine, but the dust issue is causing me enough grief that I'm seriously considering going back to a fixed lens system. Literally impossible to keep my sensor clean enough, although it's a nice feature of a 16 stop that I can shoot 30 seconds around f/4 to avoid dust, and just stack images to get a suitable imitation of a "genuine" eight minute exposure Will go and post an image :)

New poster from the far North of England, around as far up as it goes before it becomes Scotland. Used most systems and formats in the last couple of decades but appear to have finally settled on Fuji X as my system of choice. I went through a long period devoted to street photography but have come out of the other side of that (Coronavirus helped make my decision for me) and have been getting more and more back to landscape and waterscape using wide angles and 16 stop NDs. I have a weak spot for fixed lens cameras, though, and I'm never happier than when snapping away with a Ricoh GR or a Fuji X100, and I particularly love seeing how far I can push the Sony RX cameras. Look forward to reading and posting :)