carsten_ranke

Nice surreal montage !

Fascinating shapes and lines, emerging and meandering from the main stem, well placed in the center, as an anchor point, and starting point to discover this photo. I find the kind of glow effect around the lines interesting, is this a characteristic of the lens ? Or postprocessing ?

Thanks a lot for your thoughts, Peter. I think the difference is not Capture One versus CS4 direct to B&W, the difference is C1 to B&W versus C1 to color TIF, then color TIF to B&W. I have CS3 and dont use its direct B&W option because I just dont like the ACR interface. Lightroom or Photoshop for direct DNG/ RAW to B&W should do the job also.

Nice story :-) I like your composition, from that camara point the pitch of the roof is parallel to the upper border, as is the LHS of the building. The diagonals make for additional visual interest and dynamic, again perpendicular to the foreman´s line of sight. Not trivial, very good !

Karl, you must have 120% vision ;-) On top there is something like the head of a bird, see the original size photo crop. The only kind of birds there were crows, and kind of raptors. I guess this was a crow.

To bring the sharpness to the screen is a technical challenge, I was not happy with the until recently when I discovered a tool called "SAR image processor", that can downsize your images with the Lanczos 64 algorithm, you get downsized images that dont need much sharpening then. When you have a super sharp original like this one, a 50% 0.3 point smart sharpening of the LAB luminance channel is the final step. If you dont want to twiddle so much with postprocessing you can use the Photoshop bilinear algorithm for downsizing, much better than the standard bicubic, you get about 90% of the best possible result.

Its kind of obsession for me to look for order in chaos, you are perfectly right. Sometimes I have to wait for a while, here I was about half an hour or so until the right light happened (for a few seconds. Kind of decisive moment).

Cheers

Carsten

I like this very much. Your work on the foreground tones was just right IMO. The riders place on the left is debatable but with your explanation in mind it works perfect for me.

Outstanding. Really chilling, evocative, touching. One of the best B&W I have seen for a while

Very beautiful colors and contrast !

Take my vote for the color version, too. The small orange part makes for a lot impact in this blue composition. Well placed the small beach house. I find that the blue hues look a bit stressed, so to say. Dodged ? Then I would prefer the darker blue.

I am not sure that color is better than B&W here. Maybe it deflects from the formal aesthetic quality. Your choice of exposure shows nicely the flow and movement, and the diagonal makes for even more action. I tried a yellow-filtered B&W with Silver Efex Pro to show what I mean

Very nice light and color, as everyone already stated. But I think you chose this frame also aiming for the sky - jetty line triangle, including nicely the boat. (I saw that you mention A Feininger in your bio. Also one of my heroes). Very thoughtful composition. I have nothing to nitpick, maybe I would play with the hot clouds area to try how it looks a bit burnt there.

Very good. Make us see a known scene (guess: carousel) in an extraordinary, new way. And lets us see something our eyes cannot see. I have no nitpicks here.

My vote for the B&W. Color kind of distracts from her beautiful face, and lines have better flow here IMO.

Great depth by shallow DOF and by contrast of strong versus pastel colors. And nice echo of background and foreground lines. Very good !

 A nice eyecatcher :-)

My first thought was "creative composite work", and I think like you about photomontage. Hats off to your vision ! I would probably have missed this shot. Very strong colocation, holds my interest for  along while. Goes into my favs. Just curious: how did you manage DOF ?

I like the nice array of lines here, well seen and composed.

Looks like another planet :-) I like the corresponding shapes of bright sky triangle UL and rock LHS, and menacing clouds UR against turbulent water LL.

Rich detail, high quality colors and tones, perfect light, nice color contrast. But it feels a bit crowded, for my taste

Excellent night shot ! Superb light and colors, hats off !

Outstanding tones, light, and color, you dont need a 3D camera ;-)

This has a dream-like, surreal atmosphere, very good ! The small human figure attracts attention immediately, in this surrounding. Enigmatic.

Great dig ! Yeah, f8 and be there. Obviously, you imbibed your sense for composition from your infancy ;-) The road´s diagonal and those friends´ action are nicely crossing, well anticipated. Kind of HCB in Montreal...

This kind of Droodle image would be even more mysterious in B&W, IMO. The strong color contrast is nice but makes it less abstract. Very good composition, love the dramatic perspective. BTW, this Zeiss lens must be hard to beat on the 5DII, right ?

Agree with Jill. Outstanding, really. I have seen a lot of photos, this is one of the best. Nothing to improve, just great the subject matter, harmony of lines, light, colors, composition, everything. Hats off !