david_goldfarb

I don't know, Graeme, standing out on a hill during a lightning storm--I hope you were using a Berlebach or a Ries. photo.net could be liable for encouraging this kind of behavior.

 

Don't try this at home, boys and girls. Graeme is a professional.

I like the hair. It adds a note of informality. Nice tonality.

Excellent fisheye subject and composition. Where could you escape to? Behind a pew I suppose.

Interesting. What is the print process?

Sometimes a slide that looks slightly overexposed on the light table makes a better scan with a desktop scanner, I find. Between the narrow range of slide film and the narrow range of the scanner, it can be a challenge to get everything you want in there.

One of the strongest images in your gallery here. Good use of a high-saturation film and strong composition.

 

This is one of those shots where bracketing in 1/3 stops can make a huge difference. It would be good to see a bit more shadow detail, but you wouldn't want to lose the intensity of the yellow.

Strong composition and excellent light.

 

I agree with the first poster. You can do without the drop shadow and the hokey border.

Trust me, it's easy to make a lot of really boring shots with a fisheye. I find it helps to have strong foreground interest or a tubular space or to be photographing something naturally flat and round. I find it to be the perfect lens for probably fewer than 10 shots a year. Fun to have in the bag for those few occasions, though.

Excellent use of a fisheye. They were made for things like this--inspection of pipes and such.

I love the graphic, playful, abstract quality of this composition. I would be curious to see what it would look like with just a tiny bit of detail in the white area, but I don't know that it would be better that way.

I like the composition and have no objection to horizons that split the frame.

 

It's hard to judge tonality from a monitor, so take this with a grain of salt:

 

I'd print it with more contrast to strengthen the composition--more brightness in the center and a small amount of edge burning, higher value for the clouds and slightly lower value for the posts (but higher contrast to keep the detail) and their reflections.

With film, I could probably get that all by selenium toning the neg and burning the edges in printing.

 

With digital, play with levels and curves, gradient tool for the edge burning, and the dodge/burn tools on the post using the highlight/midtone/shadow settings to bring down the blacks while keeping the detail (or define the posts and do a separate levels/curves operation on them).

A B&W conversion from color? Nice tonality.

I have the same problem with my scans, so I entirely sympathize. Without an expensive drum scan, it is very difficult to come close to the original slide.

 

Theoretically, the hood should be almost long enough to cause vignetting, but on a very long lens this will be impractical and may cause new problems, like susceptibility to wind vibration. On zoom lenses, the hood has to be short enough so that it doesn't vignette at the wide end, which usually means that it will be far too short at the long end.

 

I have an old Canon FD 600/4.5, and the built-in hood is about 12.5 cm, and the clip-on extension hood is another 12.5 cm. Optically, it could probably take a much longer hood, but then the hood would need its own tripod! So maybe for a 500mm lens about 20-25 cm in total combined length would be a good place to start. You could make it longer than you think you will need, see how it works, then cut it down if it's too long.

Many really nice compositions in this portfolio. I think this one is my favorite.

 

Provia 100F +1 stop is a combination I also like for this kind of lighting.

 

On a number of shots in this portfolio (not this one so much), it looks like you're getting some reduced contrast, probably due to lens flare. In part, this is just the effect of using a 50-500 zoom, which can be quite prone to flare problems, but you can improve things by being sure to use a sufficiently long lens shade. If you find you are shooting mostly at the long end (probably so for birds), you might even consider making a hood extension out of flexible plastic, with black flocking or velvet on the inside. You can find black flocking designed for optical work from www.scientificsonline.com.

A touch underexposed (or maybe you can play a bit with curves or levels in Photoshop--try shifting the midpoint down a bit in "Levels" or adjust the channels separately rather than simply pressing "desaturate"), but luck does come to the prepared photographer. Good shot.

Great tonality and nice clouds. Almost feels surreal.

Interesting and creative work.

 

It can be hard to judge tonality from a scan, so take the following with a grain of salt:

 

I'd like to see a little more luminosity in the streaming cloth in the upper lefthand corner to balance the brightness in the lower righthand corner. I wouldn't do a reshoot, but would try some local ferricyanide bleaching on the print or maybe make a large-format copy of the negative and try local intensification with a brush and Kodak Rapid Selenium Toner 1:2.

 

Then I think I'd also bring up the value of the face of the woman standing and looking down, just a bit, by dodging.

Good work. I certainly welcome this use of photography on the site.

 

This could be done in camera, if you wanted to, with some planning, and perhaps one double exposure to get the scale of the fly like this. The one flaw might be the reflection of the photographer in the cup. Tabletop photographers would usually resolve that problem by shooting with a view camera and shifting the lens to keep the camera out of the scene. I don't know if you can get enough shift on a Canon T-S lens to do that trick, but it might be worth a try, or you might consider experimenting with a 4x5" monorail camera, which is the ideal tool for this kind of work.

Nice high key effect. I like this one best of the images posted so far. The contrast seems better here than in the others, producing an effect like a charcoal sketch.

The depth is nice, but the green is lurid. Put it in a box for a few years and see if it is still appealing then.

Excellent use of the fisheye.

Impressive. Great planning to gel your headlights. I just went back and checked your portfolio, and many of the images show great forethought and previsualization.

Sure, it looks more like "illustration" than "art," but it's a nicely done illustration. Leave the bottle in and it does become an ad for bottled water--you might have a well-paying career ahead of you. Take the bottle out and it becomes one of those trite greeting-card type photos with the text of "Desiderata" printed alongside of it. The grain works, focal length provides just the right amount of compression, toning is effective. So it's not Weston, but well done nonetheless.

Blocked up shadows in front, lurid colors in back--looks more like an ad for Velvia than a photograph of Half Dome.

This image has a very narrow tonal range, and there isn't much detail in either the highlights or the shadows. Try shooting conventional black and white film or even C-41 black and white film for better results or read this article (PDF file) about converting color scans to black and white digitally.