Imperial Cornerstone

Si señor! Me encantan estas perspectivas de cerca tan exageradas con el 19-35...

I love the angle of this one. Nice work.

Muy buena Alberto. Interesante esta foto en la que el segundo plano, el castillo, se impone sobre el primer plano aunque esté más oscuro y con menos definición....y donde tomaron el chocolate?

Pequeña corrección, Guillermo, no es un castillo...es el gran monumento de esa España Imperial, que creo que no te agrada demasiado :-) El Monasterio de El Escorial, la gran obra de Felipe II.

Y, si alguna vez vienes por acá, el chocolate se toma en el café Miranda, acompañado de picatostes (pan frito en aceite de oliva y espolvoreado de azucar) Ideal para regímenes bajos en calorias...

Very nice. Great depth. I like all the imformation provided with the photo also. The one very little nit pic which I would have is the font used for the text (personal opinion I guess). Great shot.

 

excellent, Alberto. Very well composed and the exposure is right on. Very aesthetically pleasing.

superb, perfect strong composition,top corner.

Saludos

I agree that the font's a matter of personal taste. What I try to ape is a typewriter's caption on the black border of the frame... So far I like it so, please, forget me for not following your advice.

Thanks a lot for expressing your opinion. :-))

I like the effect here. The walls streatch on for ever and ever. And the colors are great.

A good angle, Alberto, but you still haven't solved your scanning problem - nothing is realy sharp here. Besides that, the contrast is very high - TOO high imo - between the foreground and the background. Colors are a bit dull too, imo. Best regards.

Congratulations. This is a strong photo - I know the word has been used before here - but it is the right word to descripe your photo. It is catching ones eyes immediately. It makes me want to visit this place.

Very good. I like how the image is split exactly in two parts, with darkness above and light below. Probably I should try some night shots :)

I agree with some of the previous comments: nice angle, nice place to have hot chocolate :), and I also agree with Marc about the scanning thing and the contrast. In the areas where the monastery is directly illuminated (both at the left and right) it looks as if it lost quite much of the colour information... I have seen you scanned this at 48 bit/pixel, and it is very strange, since it should have a good dynamic range (at least to process the picture until you produce the final version that we see here, obviously at a smaller bit depth). Maybe the software you use to convert it from 48 bit/pixel back to 24 bit/pixel is not doing a very good job and this is the source for this problem? Just a possibility...

 

I would like to add something "new" anyway, and it is that the two vanishing points (I don't know if that is the correct terminology in English, in spanish it would be "puntos de fuga") defined by the walls departing from the corner are not in the same horizontal line, so when I look at this picture I get a slight feeling that everything is tilted to the left. It happens specially as I follow the wall on the right towards the right edge of the picture. But maybe you wanted specifically to have the vanishing points at different heights...

 

Y cómo echo yo de menos el chocolate con picatostes...

 

Regards, saludos

Muy bien! impresionante, da la sensacion de estar en tercera dimension!

Yes, I know... my scanner... a flatbed...No good for scanning mounted slides. I'm struggling with myself on whether or not to buy the new (and affordable) Minolta Dual Scan III.

The photo was taken with my very good tripod equipped with a level but.. with a Cosina 19mm-35mm lens, set at 19mm. Putting it softly and gently it is not a good lens.

The hot chocolate was great! Next time I'll have 2 cups one for me and the other to your health!

¿Como va ese frío?

Flatbed! I didn't know what kind of scanner the Epson Perfection Photo was (and was too lazy to find out). Then I understand perfectly the issues with sharpness and dynamic range... It's a pity, because I am completely sure that there is much detail lost because of the limited dynamic scanning range of flatbed scanners (when used to scan mounted slides, of course). If you buy a dedicated scanner, I think we'll notice the results immediately :)

 

Don't take advantage using me as an excuse to have two hot chocolates for yourself! ;-)) El frío se soportaría mucho mejor con ese chocolate extra... :)

 

Saludos,

Scanning problems, yes, again... I'm facing some myself at the moment when it comes to film scans... And by the way such problems are always worse for the shadow areas...

This being said, I just read your technical details... An 8MB TIFF file !?!? That's all ?? How is that possible at 1650 dpi ? I scan every film at 1200 dpi and I get much larger files than that... Can anyone confirm that ?

There's something really odd here imo. Unfortunately, I have never used your scanner before. Maybe you should ask a question in the forum to those using the same Epson...? It might save you a fortune if you get a useful tip. Regards.

Marc, I have an epson scanner too (2450). Probably Alberto is scanning his images in low resolution only to upload them, and he is getting small files because of the limited pixel count.

 

I like the results I get in scanning slides with

my flatbed... am I really losing all that detail?

After all these months of fighting with my scanner and enduring with patience and resignation your comments about the lack of sharpness in my scanned slides I have studied the matter and, in the process, become sort of an expert on scanning slides. There is a basic rule I've learned where all real experts agree: Flatbeds ain't good for scanning slides (see these two links, which I have found excellent, informative and very helpeful: Wayne Fultons scanning tips and Ken Rockwells scanning reccomendations)

If what you have to scan are slides invest on a decent film & slides scanner. With a flatbed and a good scanning software you can get scans that will be just acceptable in some few cases but no good at all if you want something similar to the clarity and sharpness of the original slide.

In my case, I use VueScan software for scanning, which I highly reccomend. It recognizes a wide selection of negative films whic helps in getting reliable scans of most negatives. Is not the same case with slides where tweaking is almost always required.

Now coming to my technique I do what I explain in the technical details of my photos but with a slight difference, the output file is with 24 bits depth to reduce the size of the final file. When I started with VueScan I scanned at 3600, but extrapolated (mistake!) and output at 48 bits. The resulting files were in the region of the 50 to 70 MB per photo!

Finally, and based on what I've read, there is a very recent addition to the Minolta family of film scanners with good results and a very competitive price:Minolta Dimage Dual Scan III

I hope this will help in understand what I do. Marc suggested that I dismount the slides from their frames (this could help if you scan just a few) but when you have masses of slides the thing to do is get out of your pocket something between 400 and 3.000 euros and buy a dedicated film scanner. Flatbeds won't do the job!

Thanks for the explaination Alberto, I see there is a lot of study needed to get a good scanned image. If I'll have to scan a lot of slides I'll consider a different equipment then. Hopefully, in a few years those scanners will be much cheaper.

 

Simone

Fabulous point of view

Una verdadera visión original!

Excelentes el encuadre y la composicíon. Es mágica la foto....Felicitaciones, Alberto. Anhelo volver a España donde viví varios años para sacar fotos. Tu carpeta de castillos me ha inspirado. Saludos.

There are many adjectives one might use to describe work like this, Alberto. Amatuer is not one of them.

 

Ciao

 

George