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Wednesday Landscapes, 12 September 2018


Leslie Reid

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You are invited to upload one or more of your landscape photos and, if you’d like, to accompany your image with some commentary: challenges you faced in making the image? your intent for the image? settings? post-processing decisions? why you did what you did? the place and time? or an aspect you’d like feedback on? And please feel free to ask questions of others who have posted images or to join the discussion. If you don’t feel like using words, that’s OK too—unaccompanied images (or unaccompanied words, for that matter) are also very much welcomed. As for the technicalities, the usual forum guidelines apply: files < 1 MB; image size <1000 px maximum dimension.

 

The same geese as last week, but a different frame and a totally different treatment of the scene (low clarity, high contrast, and a blue shift to the white balance, among other things). What started this exploration was curiosity about how small the geese could get and still dominate the image.

D03-_MG_5366.jpg.717b4a07c0f2688b2dae7186174af3d8.jpg

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244954625_twosmallfigureswalkingonbeachBWs.thumb.jpg.02b20906abbafc772dcbe298ae03e667.jpg

 

"What started this exploration was curiosity about how small the geese could get and still dominate the image."

 

Leslie - you got me thinking about how small figures could get and still dominate an image. Here is a photo of two far away people walking on a beach in fog. I decreased the tonal contrast of everything except the two figures, converted to black and white and then added a green filter, which further reduced the contrast. The two figures are clearly the center of attraction. It helps that diagonal lines and the horizon converge near the two figures and that the two figures are near the center of the image.

 

A quick and easy technique that I have been using lately to see the effect of color filters on images converted to black and white using NIK Silver Efex is to click on the red filter to start, choose a high value for the effect (I use about 70%), and then slide the "Hue" slider up and down over the complete range of hues. Sometimes the difference between, for example, light green and medium green is quite noticeable.

Edited by Glenn McCreery
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1064139793_twosmallerfigureswalkingonbeachBWs.thumb.jpg.63f90e067403cbd1ee0915a843a407cd.jpg

 

If I reduce the height of the two figures by a factor of two and place them further down the beach (after cloning them out in their initial position), they recede to the point that they are still clearly visible, but perhaps, no longer dominate the image?

Edited by Glenn McCreery
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I agree that the two figures are too well defined, especially in the second image, and probably because I intentionally made them much blacker than anything else in the image. They are not sharpened any more than the rest of the scene, the higher contrast between the figures and the background makes them seem sharper, and thus more noticeable, which was the intent of my experiment. The more realistically gray I make the two figures, the more dreary the photo appears, so I will stick with unrealistic. Edited by Glenn McCreery
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Interestingly, although the two figures appear sharper than the surroundings in the second image, they are actually less sharp (by a factor of two) than the background! The appearance of sharpness here is due solely to the high contrast. Here is a zoomed in crop where you can compare the dimensions of the jaggies on the rock with those on the two figures in the original second image (before posting at 1,000 pixel width).

1372670199_croptwosmallfigureswalkingonbeachBWs.jpg.15c65cfb2544078f2a9762f2b1cdcfdd.jpg

Edited by Glenn McCreery
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You are invited to upload one or more of your landscape photos and, if you’d like, to accompany your image with some commentary: challenges you faced in making the image? your intent for the image? settings? post-processing decisions? why you did what you did? the place and time? or an aspect you’d like feedback on? And please feel free to ask questions of others who have posted images or to join the discussion. If you don’t feel like using words, that’s OK too—unaccompanied images (or unaccompanied words, for that matter) are also very much welcomed. As for the technicalities, the usual forum guidelines apply: files < 1 MB; image size <1000 px maximum dimension.

 

The same geese as last week, but a different frame and a totally different treatment of the scene (low clarity, high contrast, and a blue shift to the white balance, among other things). What started this exploration was curiosity about how small the geese could get and still dominate the image.

[ATTACH=full]1262205[/ATTACH]

The geese are LARGE in this clean, soft image with its icy cool hue. Like again.

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kmac, I've posted this question on another site: where do you get these beautiful landscapes from? They remind me of the Wolgan Valley, or back of Broke. They are good. Would love to know. Regards, Arthur (apiarist1)

 

The Capertee valley, a little further north than Wolgan valley. Others from the Megalong valley in the Blue Mountains. The B&W landscape scene in this thread is in Queensland

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