Apertures and Exposure

A derelict castle in Derbyshire, exposed to the elements. Your time

and comments are appreciated.

Very nice framing, tonality and texture. A little mysterious. Good work.

clap, clap, clap. Your title for this shot is perfect. This shot makes the cut because you have incorporated two very important aspects - aperture and exposure - and reinforced that with the subject. Be proud.

This castle must be a good place for photographing... Excellent composition, Hanna! I think you could have gone a bit to the underexposure side....

Thankyou all. Brad, you are right and I tried to fiddle a bit in PSP. I got the same image when the sun dipped behind a cloud which is better exposed but there is no warmth to the stone. It was a very moody place. Unfortunately there was a bitter wind as the ruins are perched on the top of a big hill. I had trouble keeping my tripod from swaying.

It looks a bit gloomy, Hanna,but interestingly composed, with the window giving some insight to what els is there. I think as well that some more of this place will be nice to see.

Pnina, it was really not so gloomy because the roof is gone, so there was plenty of sunshine coming in, as you can see through the window. I did post another image called "Riber Castle - an inside view" which is somewhere in my portfolio.

Stop! I like every bricks. I really enjoyed this photo.

Nicely captured series of views receding away. The texture of the blackened stone is very good.

Nice textures and subtle tones. If you shot this raw, you could easily double process it and pull out more detail in the overexposed areas (they don't look fully clipped).

Chris, I have yet to shoot in raw; something I keep telling myself I should do but never get around to. Now can you tell me what 'clipped' means.

Hi Hanna, each pixel in the image is the result of a mix between Red, Green, and Blue channels. A channel "clips" when its brightness exceeds a level of 255. Suppose we have a patch where the values are R255, G255, B250. Then it will look blown out -- pure white -- but the presence of those last few data bits in the blue channel, between 250 and 255, mean that there's probably still a bit of detail there in the data which will become visible if you darken that area in the raw converter.

 

If you shot this one raw, you'd put it through raw to TIFF conversion two times, processing once for the highlights and once for everything else. Then you'd merge the two in Photoshop or another image editor. This makes it possible to produce images that capture scenes with a wider dynamic range than can be captured on film. You can try the same thing in jpeg using the "multiply" blending mode but since it's only 8-bit data the results might not be as good.

 

In this image, the top right corner looks like it might be fully clipped -- no data there are all, just pure white. But the bright patch on the building looks like it might still contain some detail.

...

Chris,

 

Thanks for the instruction. I've enclosed an alternative shot with shorter exposure. It has better detail but not the warmth of the sun.

Well KW, damned if you didn't sneak that in just as I was uploading my comment.

Hi Hanna, you're right about the alternate version. So the idea would be to use layers to make a composite combining the highlight detail of the alternate version with the warmth of the sunlit red brick wall from the original.