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robert100

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  1. I have posted several images over the last few months to the Monday in Nature Forum, to the Canon EOS Thursday Forum, and a few recently to a forum in a discussion with David Stephens concerning "noise in Canon 7D images". I would like to know how I get those images which I posted, permanently removed from those Photo.net records. Thank you.
  2. to Glen S. The greener of the two lizards in your photo looks to me to be a European Wall Lizard. But the one which looks somewhat browner above and greener below looks interestingly like it could be a "cross breed" of a Wall Lizard and a Northern Alligator Lizard. The Wall Lizard is the "newer arrival" of the two on Vcr Island, in fact it is a species the Royal BC Museum will take sighting reports of, and it maintains a sighting-reports map on them on behalf of the DoE. They pursue the same diet as the Alligator Lizard but they are filling what is definitely going to be an ever expanding role on the island because they will adapt to habitat which includes dense human development, which has begun driving the Alligator Lizard out. because they do not. They need/want spaces remote from human habitation, a rapidly disappearing commodity here. If you click on my name it takes you to my photonet page where, although i removed a lot of images when Imagepro was taken down, I still have a few photo samples. If you look in the "lizards snakes and stuff" folio there are a couple of photos of a European Wall Lizard I spotted and photographed earlier this summer in the newer development area going up on Triangle Mountain in Colwood, high up on the hill above the former gravel-pit. The one in my photos has in fact been identified as a male. The incredible wisdom of nature operating at its finest. It somehow found a way to have the European Wall Lizard show up at this juncture in time and space to fill a predatory void being created by man driving out the Alligator LIzard. Gotta love it.
  3. .....no photo to post this week (mechanical failure in hand-of-man station wagon redirected my time away from cameras to shopping for a decent 4x4). We celebrated the "official" day of thanksgiving in Canada a while back, but like the rest of you, no matter whether it's up here on the rocky side of the mountain on the Island, or looking out the window at the sunrise across a mile of flat nothingness back at farm on the prairies, every morning of every day I wake up surrounded by wilderness and the critters who tough-out its challenges is my thanksgiving. Thanks to you all for openly sharing your works. Every image we see teaches us something.
  4. i advertised the honda wagon for sale because it has a starter problem. In that he strolled through the yard and had a close look at it I was thinking of askin' him if he'd brought cash, but from here it didn't even look like he had a pocket to carry it in. So i just let him wander around and kick the tires<div></div>
  5. the question was "how much does facial expression .....(etc) ......."portrait". regardless of how much you enjoy cartoons, the answer to the question which was asked, is "there doesn't even need to BE a facial expression in a "portrait". And despite people on photonet throwing dead cats at each other, and the approach i used in my initial response, in which i deliberately sought out and used a "back of the head no face" image from photonets own data base, this "no face needed in a portrait" is not just a photo.net concept. It is also a "working professional's concept", and despite the explosion all over that page which came from one of the photonet "experts". I was totally well aware of that when I posted my response, deliberately limiting it to a photonet example at the time. The PPOC and PPOA both, among their annual awards, have an award which goes to the "portrait photographer of the year". There is no requirement for the images entered, by working professional portrait photographers who are members of those associations, in the "portrait" category, to include a face. Thus, also, no need for a facial "expression" of any nature. Cartooned or otherwise. Although your information is "interesting", it isn't needed in order to answer the original question. If indeed the original poster had asked a question along the lines of "how much does facial expression have an impact on you in a portrait in which the person's face is the prominent feature....?" That would be a totally different question. And one to which your answer would provide interesting insight. Don't ask how far it is to Texas if you're headed for Oklahoma. And if you think the need for accurately asking specific questions is "nit picky", remind me never to hire you to write software or design a web page/
  6. like i said................"not if you ask the "experts" at photo net"
  7. Th reason for asking “your” definition of portrait, is that the definition you apply will seem to answer your question automatically. This, is the definition according to the encyclopedia: A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. Based on that definition, the answer to your question is “it is the predominant thing”. However, if you go to the photo,net gallery page and do a search using the portrait as the “tag”, among many images pulled up, you'll find this one: http://www.photo.net/photo/17901872 And, as you can't see a facial expression when all you're looking at is the back of a head, it would seem that according to photonet, the answer to your question would be “it's irrelevant” The Photonet definition of portrait seems to disagree with the encyclopedia's definition. Guess it depends on who you believe. The experts at the encyclopedia, or the experts at photonet.
  8. You've asked an interesting question. Define "portrait".
  9. re the sunset thing, don't be too surprised if the majority of those magnifico sunrise sunset images we see posted everywhere don't have the enhancements done by playing with the "color curves" tools, especially not the one in dpp. I started to start lookiing at approaches to them when I was back at the farm in "big sky" country in 2010 and 11 where stunning sunsets and sunrises are a daily thing. I never "carried through with my studies" and actually tried hands-on with it (I've got a few thousand sunrise/set images on file and the "learn how" is still on my "to do" list, but the real work of harvest-time photos etc always got in the way). But, what appeared to me to be the approach which was producing the best results, was an approach using "gradient mapping" in photoshop (and my elements6 has the tool in it). I watched a couple of you-tube videos on it, I recall one which was a wedding photo in which a gradient-map sky had been produced and put in the background. I spent five minutes one night playing with it but never really got my hands/brain to the point they understood how it works, and i've not had it as "number one" on the project list to get back to. Pop into you tube, do a search of "sunsets sunrises gradient mapping" and see what you find in the way of instruction. The farm in Ab is an amazing contrast to the specific locale I am in here on the Island, where I'm tucked deep into stands of 70 foot tall cedars and below the rim of the mountain. Here, I seldom even get to see the sun, period. At the farm, with an 8 foot high 12 foot wide window facing east across a half mile of nothingness, the mornings you notice aren't the ones with spectacular sunrises, those are the "norm". The ones you notice are actually the days when they don't happen. Same thing with sunsets. At the farm you can see it go down "at the regional hour of the sunset". Up here on the mountain on the island, the sun is high enough above the tress i finally get to see it around 1130 hours, and it disappears from my site-line, leaving me in deep blue shadow by roughly 1530 hours in mid afternoon these days, even though it doesn't actually "set" for four hours after that. I have zero view from here at my rv studio-trailer of either the sunrise, or sunset. I have almost wrap-around glass, and an almost 360 degree view of a cold blue wall of cedars and leafless maples. It's like being on a totally different planet. re the Flikr thing. I haven't set up an acct yet because i haven't even ever set up a yahoo account and name. But my understanding, if I read correctly, is that although they display all images as jpegs, I could actually upload full sized tif files (which saves me the steps of downsizing to pint-sized, and the conversion step. Yes/no ?
  10. incidentally, this is a side note to the topic, but it's something I've also gained from this thread. With the killing of the website stuff and some comments by others like yourself, which got me paying attention to the fact you and they post images to "flikr", i've looked at "flickr", which I had not before. And now see why people use it instead of pnet. It's because you get away from this diddly-playing around at having to chop images down to miniscule before loading them, over there you can actually load a whole big image. After all the random chop-chop-chop i was doing to get that little birdie up on here, and the frustration of it, I also appreciate the lead to "over there".
  11. you wanna have some fun ? Last summer I took a "red" pair of pvc gloves and photographed them (with a 40D) to do some monitor-tests with. I was looking at buying a new monitor, and was not seeing anything in the stores which impressed me even a bit. I've been quite comfortable visually with what I get on my Toshiba laptop, but i've had it for years and am "accustomed" to what it shows me. (and the second monitor I had was a Samsung, which despite its reputation, I was never happy with). Nothing I saw in the stores seemed similar. I had taken a handful of random photo files, loaded em to a flash drive and carried em with me as a look-see, and nothing looked good. So, finally, I took the pair of red gloves, photo'd em, then brought them in and sat them right here beside my laptop while I processed the photos, to make sure I was getting the photos to give me an exact color match, to make sure i was comfortable with the color it was giving me on the Toshiba, and then go from there. Do you know, that sitting right here, with the gloves physically beside me, I was totally unable, using dpp with the raw, and then adobe elements with tifs, to actually get a "true" color match on either of my monitors. Not the Toshiba laptop, and especially not on the "high reputation" Samsung (which was theoretically, "perfectly calibrated"). I was not able, no matter what i did, able to reproduce "on screen", the exact color of the gloves I had physically sitting next to me on my table. The one thing I did find, in a month of not-happily checking out monitors........was that despite the 'brand names| on the front bezels.....99 percent of the stuff out there are using a color processor chip which comes out of the same manufacturing plant.......and thusly.....none of them are any better than any other. What I really wanted, was to find a combination tv/monitor I could be happy with having run 'backgound slide shows" here while I was painting at my easel, so I could have a series of reference photos just running in the background I cold glance over at . I found, by testing and then digging, that one of the very expensive high- end tv/monitors i looked at (over a thousand bucks), had exactly the same color processing chip in it, as a $248 dollar "store brand named" 29 inch unit. Not impressive. In all my hunts, only one monitor, and only one size and model within the overall brand, actually seemed to be good at what it claimed to do. It was a 21 inch Asus. But sit it side by side with the 19 inch of the same brand, and the 23 inch of the same brand....and the one, lone, 21 incher, seemed "accurate". Another thing to remember, is that not everyone can actually see the variances in color. IE, in painting with oils or acrylics, to have pigments which give you a full workable range so you can mix clean non-muddy colors, you need a "bluish red" and a "yellowish red", and a "yellowish blue" and a "reddish blue", and a "bluish yellow" and a "reddish yellow". (because of the nature of painting and all the supports etc, this gives you a broader working capacity than just primaries). And it can take months.......months............to get new students to even be able to "see" the difference between a "blue-red" and a "yellow-red" for example. It's a "learned" ability. The learning curve, time, is different in different people, some learn quickly, and some in fact, never do. They never acquire the ability to see the difference. (and there can be physical reasons for that, just because everyone has rods and cones doesn't mean they all are the same quality rods and cones) We aren't machines. In humans, color is a perception. And it is a perception with major psychological implications, not just differences in the 'physical properties of the wavelength'. Wanna read a good book ? See if you can find an old copy of "The Luscher Color Test", the pocketbook version. The full lab-test thingy is done with over a hundred color swatches, the pocket book shows you and discusses something like a dozen or so. Just enough to get across a rudimentary and "basic understanding". The successful artists I know, use the knowledge of the psychological impact of colors in their paintings every time they pick up a brush.
  12. .....recovering from a forest fire two years prior. Although the knowledge it was a result of the clumsiness of man and not a fire initiated by nature in its own cycles perhaps makes the happiness of the sunrise a figment of my own imagination, yes, it's always alright, the earth may take time to do it, but it eventually always covers our footprints.......<div></div>
  13. David. You do realize what you are looking at here, right ? You're giving me advice on what you would do to "make correct" an image which is not worth even working on. It was not intended to even be "taken" as an image worth working on to do anything "public" with. This is a photograph I 'snapped off' of a one to one and a half inch long bird simply because it was what happened to jump out of the bushes when i was out walking around with my camera set at iso4000 and plus one ev in order to test whether going ettr would give me more useable iso range. This is a one inch bird, from 18 feet away, photographed with a four hundred dollar lens (which also has dust inside it). There is nothing.............absolutely nothing........about this photograph which could ever be done which would make it a 'useable' photograph, it's not a "good" photograph. As our discussion on this thread was about trying to get useable higher iso's by getting above the noise, this photograph does show me, that I will be able to get that. I applied chromatic noise reduction, and found, happily, i was able to kill the floor noise. I then took one (and now two) of the 18 meg image of the bird at iso4000 and plus one eve, took a cropping out of it which is a "miniscule" portion of the overall image, to bring the little birdie up where it could be seen, so people can see the chromatic noise is low........and......made the mistake of putting it up here. The cropping I took out of the original photograph was not taken as even a "decent composition". I just laid the cropping tool on the image, took a "two second wave of the lines to take a rough and sloppy" chunk of it which had the bird in it......then I took that, converted it to a jpeg....and downsized it to a 'loadable' size. When I did that, I actually found I was "over the size limit". So......I took the image and chopped another chunk off the left side of it......checked it again.....and it was still over the size limit.........so I chopped another chunk off it.....with no "design" in mind.....I was just lopping chunks off it left and right to try to get down to the "size limit".....so I could post it here to show one thing....and one thing only: That yes, this will indeed....when I find an image worth taking and doing something with.....allow me to use higher iso than I had been using. You are giving me instruction on how to 'improve the overall look', of an image which does not have even the initial basic merit to justify doing anything with. And was never intended to. The chromatic noise level this shows is workable, That's the intent of showing it here. The "detail" in the feathers, for example, is not 'workable'. It's not there. This is a jpeg, at medium quality, of one-fiftieth of the original image. Nothing about it, could be be turned into a "usable" image. Look at the chromatic noise (the absence of it) in the bird's body.. That's all this was posted here to show. Thank you for your input. Always appreciated.
  14. you may find the time-line compression in that a tad confusing....I came to the island in the 80's after selling my half the photo studio operation, but for the first few years here I still had my Linhoff 4x5 view camera. The experience with the Nikon 2 meg pocket-jobby and not getting bracketed prints was the first digital i bought, which was maybe 2003 or so....
  15. yup, it had just flitted up out of deep shadow to a grass/twig which was in a direct sun-ray, which at this time of year at that spot up here on the mountain is coming across at a very low angle just barely peeking through cedars at the horizon. 1/1000 of a second. Don't forget, i really have not done anything with these images to make them "showable", I have not taken them over into elements and done any of the detailed work I do to "publish" an image, it's just hit with the basic stuff in dpp and a crop pulled out which i could toss on here by downsizing it. As far as "what else to do with it", frankly I wouldn't even take this cropping over into elements to work with, i'd crop it totally differently. here's another one, in this one it had shifted it's angle, taking the glaring sun highlight off its head and chest. This one thus gives it a far more "balanced" on the bird itself of dark-and-lites of exposure and gives more detail to work with. Of the two images, if I were to take them further, this would be the one I'd take to do it with. This one was the same iso4000, 1/1000 second. and i bumped the av to f11. As far as "bring up the dark shadows", that in fact is one major "fault" with the whole new garbage of the "matrix metering" systems all the camera mfrs keep trying to get people to use, is that the whole theory behind it is you should be able to "see into" every shadow area, and no bright areas should get "clipped". That is a garbage approach to exposure. It totally defies the way your eye works. When you walk outside on a sunlit day, there are going to be areas of dark shadow you can't see into. And there are going to be areas so bright you can't look into them. That's the way the "real world" works. It's the way your eye works. This "mish- mash" of everything being "seeable-into" is a fairy tale. And it is B-o-r-i-n-g. To have visual "impact" an image needs - absolutely needs - the full range from deep deep darks, to bright bright brights. In addition to being a photographer I'm also an artist, I work in acrylics. I've been teaching art classes for years. I teach "the elements and principles of design". And it is the first friggin challenge every art teacher speaks of having to try and get students to do.....is to lay down an area of rich, deep, deep, dark, and get a full range of contrast into their work. It is students number one universal sin" they're afraid to actually squeeze out a huge dollop of that expensive professional grade pigment and "do something with it. They almost all, start out painting wishy-washy middle-toned boring junk. You wanna have an interesting experience ? When i first came out to this island back in the late 80's, I had sold my partnership in the photo studio back in Alberta. Where I had been very accustomed to having a full 20 inch processor in our very own in-house lab, which thusly, when I "bracketed" an exposure, gave me "bracketed" prints to look at and judge where to go from. So, suddenly here I am, on this island with "no" lab of my own. I bought a little Nikon 2 meg point and shoot. Took it to the beach, and to get used to it, ran off a bunch of images on which I specifically took 3 exposures of every image....bracketed.......at '0', and plus one, and minus one. Took em to the dealer where I'd bought the camera, handed the card over to their lab and ordered a set of 4/6 prints. I go back and pick em up the next day. take em all out of the envelope to have a look at which exposure setting gives the best results.............and I'm looking at an envelope of images in which all three of every "bracketed" image............looks E-x-act-ly......Identically exposed. I went to the manager of the camera department and said "this camera's exposure meter doesn't work". She looked at the images I was showing her, and said "oh yah, the meter works fine.............but you had screwed up two of every three exposures.....half of em were underexposed and half of were over-exposed.......so our technician who runs the machine hits the "auto adjust" button, and she corrected them all for you. It's what we do for all the amateur soccer-moms. Do you know that I could not even get that "technician" to understand "why" i had deliberately "bracketed" every image. She had no idea why anyone would even do that. Do you know what I had to do in order to get "bracketed" prints ? I had to take the images, download them, resize them, and create a "layered" image of them in which I put a one-quarter inch wide "border" around each image, of pure, solid, black. Their "auto exposure adjust button" couldn't screw with that, I "forced" it to give me bracketed prints. There are two major flaws in the "normal everyday" approach to photography. One is this garbage of trying to get "matrix see into everything metering". Your eye doesn't work that way in real life, you can't see into shadow and into brightness "both at the same time". Your eye adjusts its "aperture" to the one you're looking into, it can't do both at the same time. And the other fault, is DOF. A landscape image which is "all in focus" foreground to background, is "un-natural" to your eye. Your eye has an incredibly shallow Depth of Field. You can focus visually on one thing, and one thing only, at a time. Our approach to photography today is in total, total, contradiction to the way we see things in person. That is in fact the "magic" of the "artist" side of my profession. Is that artists, the good ones. learn and understand and apply, all the principles and elements of design..........hard and soft edges.....light vs dark....the color wheel, color complements etc. In photography, we have slowly been getting further and further away from those, leading to "everything in mid tone everything in focus mish-mash junk". And that, is a true shame. I'd do a lot more work to this image to make it "publishable", but the two things I would not touch, are the deep darks and the bright highs, Those are elements of the design, And they belong in this image. They are "the reality" of what was there. They are what will give the final image "iimpact". They are the "art" in it. <div></div>
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