brianpsullivan

Thanks for looking and critiquing

These are beautiful creatures and you've captured this one nicely. Thanks for sharing. It's cool that with such a flat animal in this orientation you can keep the whole butterfly in focus while still having such a narrow DOF. How far away were you?

I've never seen a peacock fly before. I didn't know they could. They must flap pretty rapidly to show so much motion at 1/250 sec. It's pretty cool how only the head is near sharpness. Where in the zoom range of 18-135mm were you?

Thanks for looking.

Thanks for looking

Thanks for looking and critiquing.

A few feet away from the screen this looks good to me, but up close I think it's a bit over sharpened. Any tips on unsharp masking the water droplets while keeping the background bokeh smooth?

Thanks for looking.

Constructive comments and critiques appreciated.

Thanks for the comments.

Alexa,

I actually accentuated the blown highlights in the upper left a bit to increase the feeling of the sun shining on this scene.

 

Micki,

I tried a few things with black and white after reading your comment, but I wasn't able to find a mix of channels that preserved the details of the tattoo to my satisfaction without making the rest of the image look bad.

Thanks for looking.

Thanks for looking and for comments/critiques.

Thanks for looking.

Thanks.

Thanks for looking, and thank you for your comments.

Thanks!

Thanks for commenting. I know the grass in the foreground is unfortunate.

Hi Alexa.

I like the retention of the floor too. Yes, GIMP is basically the only photo manipulation program I really use. Here's a tutorial that should help with this photo. The key step is applying a Gaussian blur with a radius of around 5-10 pixels to the edge of the mask. It's been a while since I used Photoshop, but I found the learning curve to be similarly steep to GIMP for things like layer masking.

Efharisto. Kalispera from the US. (Sorry, that's about the extent of my Greek knowledge, though I can read the alphabet from using it in physics.) I think the contrast you added is an improvement. I considered totally cropping the window, too.

 

Alexa,

Thanks. I liked the yellow/greenish cast on the hair too (though my fianc饠hated it), but in truth it isn't the light from the window causing the color cast, that was a manipulation. It would be nice to have a green or yellow film to hold on my office window though (I took this at work with my desk lamp and the afternoon sunlight from the window as primary and secondary light sources.

 

How's GIMP working for you? I've found it to be a kind of steep learning curve, but I've gotten more comfortable with it after doing some of the tutorials at gimp.org/tutorials

Did you use just a fill flash? Was this a single exposure? Sorry if these are uninformed questions. I'm just beginning to learn.

I was trying to emulate a Dragan type HDR look, but I think it came out looking more like the

lighting in a Vermeer or Rembrandt portrait, (though obviously inferior to any portraits of

theirs). Too dark I guess. I'd like to read others' thoughts.

Thanks for looking. Comments/critiques apreciated.

Thanks for looking.

Thanks for your kind comment. "A Scanner Darkly" was the inspiration for this manipulation. I can't imagine doing a whole movie based on how long it too to digitally rotoscope just one static image, but they had some pretty good algorithms I imagine.

Thanks,Tony, Dirk, and Daily. Tony, the eyedropper made many of the color choices, but I exaggerated some of them.