Wednesday Landscapes, 10 October 2018

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.

My apologies for posting the thread late, but for some reason I wasn’t able to access Photonet earlier this morning. Anyway, my travails with motion blur in the photo of the wave from last week got me thinking once again about Dieter Schaefer’s very interesting comment from the 8 August thread: he noted that when photographing waterfalls, he likes to use a shutter speed (1/8 to 1/250) that provides an amount of motion blur that’s consistent with what the eye sees—not ethereally blurry, and not clinically sharp. I started thinking about the situations in which I try to push the envelope to the extremes, and came up with this one for the clinically sharp end of the range (1/1000). For me, this scene called for an almost-over-sharp treatment in part because it shows me things I couldn’t have seen on my own, and that bumps the scene several steps away from my experience of reality. In that sense, I think the hyper-sharp treatment introduces an odd element of abstraction here.

Slightly less turbulent water...

I find capturing wave action with an appropriate shutter speed even more challenging than waterfalls. Something like Leslie's image above to me certainly calls for a short shutter speed. Gentle wave action like small surf may often benefit from the "blurred out" treatment to avoid the otherwise quite sharp line running through an image.

I can't recall why I chose 1/15s shutter speed for this image - probably to create that flowing effect of the water running off the rocks - but I sure don't like the way it rendered the waves in the lower part of the image.

There's also considerably risk in using too slow a shutter speed to achieve that silky flowing water look as it is quite easy to overexpose that portion of the image.

Canon IXUS 960 IS

Anna Ruby Falls, NE Georgia

I find capturing wave action with an appropriate shutter speed even more challenging than waterfalls. Something like Leslie's image above to me certainly calls for a short shutter speed. Gentle wave action like small surf may often benefit from the "blurred out" treatment to avoid the otherwise quite sharp line running through an image.

 

I can't recall why I chose 1/15s shutter speed for this image - probably to create that flowing effect of the water running off the rocks - but I sure don't like the way it rendered the waves in the lower part of the image.

 

There's also considerably risk in using too slow a shutter speed to achieve that silky flowing water look as it is quite easy to overexpose that portion of the image.

Dieter, I appreciate the explanation you provided regarding the shutter speed you used. I've encountered the overexposure issue as well.

Pentax 645N, 45-85mm SMC FA, Tmax400 (TMY2), Rodinal semistand. Steamboat Lake, CO.

by bc50099

This was shot at 1/8 and also the first time I used a polarizing filter.

This is from a scan of a negative that I took about twenty years ago with a 4x5 view camera. I think that the (unrecorded) slow shutter speed helps show the flow of the water around the dead tree in the overflowing creek. I can't recall whether or not I thought of that composition detail at the time, but I did take several photos with varying shutter speeds, which is a good approach, if you are uncertain of how moving water will appear in a photo.

Here are a couple of old ones from Tallulah Gorge in Georgia. Since the topic is trying to change the look of water with slow speeds, I used Velvia here with a Minolta 600si in an attempt to smooth out the watar. Pretty place. I still can't get the hang of making a whole lake or river look like a sheet of ice, but at least it's interesting.

This was a shot from last week after heavy rain at Ricketts Glen State Park in PA. This is called Waters Meet which is where Ganoga Glen and Glen Leigh meet.

Here's one I shot of Smith Creek, one of the creeks that supply Anna Ruby Falls in NE Georgia (near Helen). I used a longer exposure to produce the silky effect.

Smoky Mountains

Lakemont Pines , CA

I though I would share one more. This was taken 1/2.

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.

 

My apologies for posting the thread late, but for some reason I wasn’t able to access Photonet earlier this morning. Anyway, my travails with motion blur in the photo of the wave from last week got me thinking once again about Dieter Schaefer’s very interesting comment from the 8 August thread: he noted that when photographing waterfalls, he likes to use a shutter speed (1/8 to 1/250) that provides an amount of motion blur that’s consistent with what the eye sees—not ethereally blurry, and not clinically sharp. I started thinking about the situations in which I try to push the envelope to the extremes, and came up with this one for the clinically sharp end of the range (1/1000). For me, this scene called for an almost-over-sharp treatment in part because it shows me things I couldn’t have seen on my own, and that bumps the scene several steps away from my experience of reality. In that sense, I think the hyper-sharp treatment introduces an odd element of abstraction here.

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Leslie if I could figure out how to add this to my favorites I would. Wow!

Taken last week on the island of Maui

Dolgoch Falls not quite on a par with Niagara.

Sunday morning, after all the rain .

Cathedral Rock Moonrise - Sedona, AZ. Took several trips to get this one, with help from the Photographer's Ephemeris app for moonrise data.

Ignore. Posted this in the wrong place and don't know how to delete the post.