petemillis

Another good one Gord. I wish there was somewhere near me with plenty of birch trees! I like the way you have used a swoopy sort of movement here - I'm guessing the camera went up and over an arc?

 

Nice balance of colours and tones that gives a great sense of this time of year.

 

 

Gord, I'm with the others here - this is a fantastic image with the artists concentration really shining through. And best of all - it's just introduced me to Jessica Pavone....and with a daughter who started playing violin a few months ago I have something else for her to listen to.

 

cheers.

This is second of the Brighton Bus Pass pictures. A medium format

Mir 26b 3.5/45 lens was used, in combination with the Arax tilt

adapter on the Canon 10D. This has enable a wide aperture (f3.5) to

be used in order to use a reasonably fast (1/15sec) shutter speed

while allowing areas of both the bus (close to me) and the royal

Pavilion (much further away) to be in sharp focus.

 

Any thoughts on how to improve on this would be much

appreciated...or any other comments...

 

Thanks.

Alberta, I've just redone the image with more desat and a bit of a sharpen. The colours seem about right now - the Brighton buses are cream coloured, and the illumination on the Royal Pavilion shows the stone up for the building up as the cream colour it is. I'm much happier with this now - so thanks again.

 

I've also just uploaded "Brighton Bus Pass 2", which I think is pretty neat too. Again using the same technique to get both bus and Pavilion with some sharp focus.

Alberta for your feedback on this. I agree with your slight desat and also further sharpening. It definitely makes the image better to view - thank you for that.

 

There's a really strange thing I notice in this picture and that is the lines at the front of the bus. It makes it look like it's trying to go into warp drive like in Star Trek! I think that it's caused by the street lighting flickering at 100Hz - the photograph was taken using an exposure time of 1/10sec, and I see 9 to 10 lines at the front of the bus. I've noticed this sort of thing before in some other pictures I have taken where I have moved the camera during a long exposure.

 

Gord's drive by shooting, and long exposure shots,and his lovely pictures of Darwin and Maggie, rock. It was his pictures and experiments, and his helpful words, that have led me down this path!

 

 

Using Arax tilt adapter with Mir 26b 3.5/45 medium format lens. The

only post proc has been crop, levels and sharpen (all in the free

Canon DPP). Tilt used to enable some of the bus and some of the

Pavilion to be in focus whilst using a wide aperture. Use of a small

aperture to increase DOF would have resulted in a shutter speed so

slow that the bus would just be one long blur and barely visible.

The shutter speed used here was 1/10sec. I suppose I could have used

a much higher ISO to enable use of smaller aperture, but then I'd

have ended up with the whole of the image in focus which isn't what

I wanted.

 

I'm working on using lens tilt in combination with slow shutter

speeds and low light....any input on what I might try or how I might

do something better, as well as any general comments, would be much

appreciated.

 

(PS, you may not see this as fine art, but I did put a lot of

thought into getting this image how I wanted it, and I'm not sure if

it would be better placed in "cars and vehicles" or "architecture"

or "street")

Gord, I want your dog :)) Man, Darwin is gorgeous - this is one hell of a fantastic Christmas card.

 

You must have some real patience, or at least really patient dogs, to get such great relaxed looking pictures. Cool work.

Definitely chat in real life soon - I wonder where that disposable camera has got too?

But then when I look at the image again....I still find I come back to the wide crop. The light in the background and the faint outline of the roof helps locate the image for me at Rottingdean Pond....With the roof being so dark, and the lighted window being out of focus, I'm not really seeing them as distracting. for me, they seem to make the image more interesting. so many ways of looking at something is what makes it all worthwhile :))

Shaun, thanks a lot for dropping by and having a tweak. I like the square crop you have done and think it works well. My only concern is that it seems a little tight and I think it has chopped the top off the monument - that ridge where the monument goes from wide to narrow need to be lower down in the frame to avoid chopping the top, which although you can't see very well as it's so dark..I know is there (it shows up when I brighten the image up). So I've just played with a slightly bigger square crop, placing the crosses third way in from the left, and the monument itself third way in from the right - this puts the crossed off centre and I think it makes the selective focus (lens tilt) work better....what do you think?

 

Cheers again - a second pair of eyes really helps sometimes.

Brian, love this shot - the rotation of the lens combining with a slow shutter speed has produce a great effect. I have a quite a few likt this. Anyone who thinks things like this can only be done in photoshop has very little understanding of what can be achieved with a camera.

 

Pete

straight shot...(boring, too noisy as underexposed)

Hi Denis. Many many thanks for your thoughts on this picture. I agree that getting more of the site in sharp focus would be better, and at the time I didn't think to try a different plane of focus so I'll have a go at this next time. It's really difficult trying to work out exactly what I've got until I put the pictures on the PC. I get a vague idea from the viewfinder, no idea at all from the small LCD on the back of the camera, and only a good idea when I get home!

 

The lights on the left and right that have the appearance of being much closer aren't actually that much closer in reality. The fact they're OOF turns them into bigger blurry blobs and perhaps gives that impression. Below is a straight shot that shows this better I think. Also, this straight shot taught me something else - I underexposed it one stop and this really showed the problem of high noise when increasing the exposure of the RAW file in post processing. So I know now why people say move the historgram as far right as possible to reduce noise (increase signal to noise ratio) at higher ISO. This was only ISO 400, but the underexposed shot is appalling!

 

Thanks again - I'll follow your ideas through and see what happens. I can't use a longer lens at the moment as the longest I have in pentacon 6 mount to fit the tilt adapter is the 90mm I used tonight. But I am on the hunt for something bigger.

Landscape I suppose....

 

This was taken with a Vega 12b 2.8/90 medium format lens attached to

Canon 10D view an Arax tilt adapter. I was debating whether to use

lens tilt or not for this shot, but without the tilt the lights to

the left and to the right appeared as boring specs of colour, rather

than sexy out of focus blobs, and the impact of the cranes at the

construction site kind of didn't happen.

 

Any thoughts on the validity of the tilt for this shot would be much

appreciated. I know for sure that using tilt works far far better

than adding a selective blur in photoshop... Thoughts on subject

matter, crop and execution would be really welcome. I have plenty of

opportunities to reshoot.

Gordon and Pnina, thanks for your comments on this. I know what you mean about the "noise" in the image, with the quite unnatural banding...but I'm not sure what to do to improve it. I've done NR in post processing, but it won't make it look pretty so I chose to accept it for what it is. If there is a way to make it better then please let me know as I'd like to see how much I can improve on it. I suppose I could use the healing tool in Canon DPP to somehow blend it in in the sky which I think is where it's perhaps most obtrusive.

Gordon, I think you may be right...I am perhaps slightly down to the left by a fraction of a degree. I'm quite pleased it was close though considering hand held in the cold, in that dark, with hardly anything to see in the viewfinder and holding it for 1.5 seconds ;)) I know if it had been a bit more out then I would have done the correction but I was sort of hoping nobody would notice :)

Gordon and Rachel - I apologise for my tardy response and thank you both for commenting on this picture. There's so much to see down at the beach ;) I did try rotating as Gordon suggested and it does create a different image -almost like the limpets are skating across the ice! But the seaweed didn't look right - it really feels to me like it should be dangling. Hmmm, I like both..

 

This photo, by the way, was one of my first taken with the EF-S 18-55 lens that I had to hack to fit the EOS 10D. I was pretty pleased concidering it was such a cheapy!

Gord, the foreground building is perfect for this. Without that building then the image would be just a colourful cityscape. The humble looking building in the foreground adds some great contrast, and almost looks like it's completely out of place, which works a treat. I like the way the clouds of steam wafting from the buildings has been capture as well - it adds an element of movement or life to what are otherwise solid stationary forms.

 

Nice interesting picture with plenty to draw the viewer in. Well spotted.

 

Pete

colour version (large) link...

colour version

This is another photograph for which I decided to use tilt (Arax

tilt adapter in combination with a Vega 12b 2.8/90 medium format

lens on the Canon 10D). The idea here is to capture sharply focused

finger polishing the flute, with some nice bokeh going on in the out

of focus highlights. The lighting here was just the overhead halogen

dowlighters in my living room. I used wide aperture (f2.8) to keep

the sharp focus region tight, an ISO setting of 400 as I didn't want

too much noise, but this meant I had to have a slow shutter speed of

1/10 second. Camera was hand held with the 90mm lens tilted 8

degrees to the left.

 

I have achieved what I wanted to achieve, but am still not sure of

preference for the sepia tint, or the colour version (see below).

The colour version shows the bokeh better I think - but I think the

sepia has a better feel overall....maybe.

 

Any input would be much much appreciated.

 

Thank you.

 

Pete

Kevin, this is a great image - it looks like what you would see when splitting open a mold that had been used to cast a leaf from lead! Well spotted.

Ahhh, the Grinch who stole Christmas...

Jim, many thanks for your comment here. Every time I look at this picture, for some reason I hear the word "HELP!".

 

Thanks again.

 

Pete

Gordon, this is a great picture, and I'm a bit miffed that Jospeh beat me to a comment about the crooked chimney - I wanted to say that. I love the contrast between the modern looking buildings in the background and the well weathered foreground building. Nice colours and interesting roofscape. It makes me shiver thinking it must be cold outside, and I imagine warmth in the lighted room with the curtain. Well spotted. And I honestly can't offer suggestions for improvements.

Thank you all for your comments here. Your input is very highly valued. Dave, I agree with you that "old" is probably not right for this image, and if truth be told, I wasn't really aiming for old anyway. What I'm trying to do in a lot of my pictures is to deliberately avoid the perfect reproduction of what it actually there, but to instead produce something that is more "pictorial" I guess, and to convey feelings. Almost like using what is there in my view to draw or paint a picture on the camera sensor or film! It's an enjoyable experience using the camera and minimal post processing to produce images that are far removed from the perfect captures that appear in advertisements for the latest perfect camera!