Sunglasses required

Hello everyone,

This image was captured in raw using Sigma 30mm 1.4 at F16. No

filters of any kind was used. Thanks for your comments and critiques.

please do view in it's larger format.

Regards.

Thanks for the technical information. What is a DR challenge?

 

I have been over this folder several times. This is exquisite shooting. The light is lovely and the the sunspots and sunpaths exceptional. Since this is the one with the request for critique, I will type here, even though, it is not my favourite. But this sunspot is the best one, I think.

 

I like the foreground in this one showing the shadows of the snow covered rocks(?). The tree on the left is my only complaint in this one. If there was just one tree along the edge of the frame it would match the 'framing' on the other side.

Well, It's a Dynamic Range challenge, the level of detail between the brightest and the darkest pixels.

Only those who are familiar with this type of capture, shooting into a bright sun, will appreciate and understand a shot like this. you can see the circle of the sun and the clouds next to around it without a blown area. At the same time you can see a great level of detail elsewhere and all this was done with one shot and one conversion.

 

This is a great site, probably the best. The only problem is that some people feel qualified to rates images they have no clue about. I'd like to put up images for critiques only but again, people are too busy to leave a substantial comment.

 

This is the lake in my neighborhood and a pretty one too. the only problem is that the side where I can take shots like this, is too bushy with a few openings like this.

I personally do not have a problem with the trees on the left. If the diagonal tree was not there, it would have probably been too symmetrical and with the sun dead center. This of course does not mean I'm right as have much, much room for knowledge acquisition.

This is good and you did an excellent job with the dynamic range. This is my favorite kind of shot I love to shoot directly into the sun. Not that I am any good at it. what I normally do is find a grey area to take a reading from and open up a stop or two. and the brush? you can use the brush to lead your wiewer into the scene or to frame your subject.

Nice Work

Sue.

What an interesting co-incidence. I was recently reading about shooting sunspots on this forum. I even posted a comment to my blog, bookmarked the forum, and loaded a couple of my flares to a wnw forum sunspots. I think you could probably contribute a lot to either of those two forums. The wnw (words/no words) one only seems to have a couple of nice sunspots on it to equal your DR challenge shots.

There is a lot of information in the forums. I just have to ignore the ratings. They are worse than meaningless, because we all get upset about them. That and getting no comments/critiques. I don't know how to encourage critiques, except by spending a lot of time trying to critique intelligently. But it takes me ages and much research, sometimes. Other times, I just enjoy the photos and maybe contribute a light comment. It is encouraging to find someone who will reward your time spent with a return critique too. I think, over time, you just build up a number of friends who do this, depending on the time we each have to spend, and go about critiquing each other's photos.

Perhaps, when and if we get more time we could involve a group of people in shooting to a theme. Some friends on Pbase are shooting the alphabet. I guess they email around to each other when they have a letter photo loaded and whoever has time goes to critique it. Or something like your DR challenge could work for the theme. Once I was participating (on yet another site) where we were shooting to the assignments that one member of the group had been required to shoot as part of her photography class assignments. She gave us the assignments just like they had been given in class. It was an excellent idea, but people could not be bothered to try to shoot to the assignments. Too serious, maybe. I don't know. It was an excellent idea, but we just could not make it go. She is no longer living in NYC and I have lost track of her, so cannot bring her to photo.net. Don't really have a lot of time right now, myself, either. And so it goes.

Thank you for the comment. I Like your artistic approach to photography. Taking a shot like this is where equipment can help you a bit also what can really help is the technique you use to process the shot.

I shoot an image like this in raw and do all the adjustment in converting the raw file with not much processing afterwards.

You probably are good Sue and capable of delivering the goods but be aware that a shot like this is virtually impossible with an old film camera without extensive, extensive lab work.

Thanks again and your suggestions are always valuable.

Thanks a lot for the comments and the links you have included. I did contribute to both.

This is probably the best site for sharing photos because of the traffic and the layout of the site.

The ratings become more relevant when the comments become more meaningless. Wow, terrific, gorgeous... doesn't tell you much. Sometimes we want to know how terrific, how gorgeous and how much you like it and this is where a rating helps. But, as we all know, the biggest problem with that is the fact that too many people think they are experts in all fields of photography and they click rate images ranging from Macrophotography to portraits and fine arts!

Maybe we can create a forum within the forum for all who are into commenting and maybe rating as well. I think I may rate your images whenever I leave a comment and will not be afraid that you may get offended with my possible low rate, as a matter of fact, I know you won't. If you feel that I might have made a mistake in rating, you may want to bring that up.

One might not be able to go over too many images this way but it would be more meaningful.

I Guess we are all looking for that perfect solution that does not exist!

Thanks.