julianj1

I would agree with all so far and add that you can create looks like this by combining blur and sharpening layers and reducing the opacity of the blur layer on top you get an 'ethereal glow'. It is then possible to use selective erasing of the blur layer to let crisp detail show through in places where it is needed.

 

It is a technique that needs to be used carefully or it looks like 'just another photoshop effect'.

I enjoy a mix of the local photographic society, this site, some good books and magazines and lots of experimentation. Formal educatuion would be too rigid for my learning style and life style.

 

For pure technical education in Photoshop I would get a copy of Real World Photoshop and study bits of it as you need them.

 

I also get books on photographers I like; my latest is on the work of Atget.

 

Some good advice also is to give yourself a project (or several), something on which you can focus and start to build a style around.

 

Hope this helps!

This looks like sharpening that has been enhanced by HDR manipulation. You may have sharpened before merging

(perhaps sharpening is set automatically in camera if you are not using RAW). Getting rid of it automatically is

beyond me other than some manual work with the clone stamp. Like the image by the way .. those sealed knot guys

are great.

Good advice from Christine. It's a creative AND a technical thing ... getting the basics right is important. I would suggest that you buy a good technical book on photoshop and use it to understand things a bit at a time (the 'real world' series is great). Creatively, get out there and have a go. Keep scrap books. Look critically at magazine photos. I can't remember who it was (Ansell Adams? David Bailey) who when asked how many great pictures he takes a year, answered: "one, perhaps two". It's difficult and requires patience, practice and study. Years of it! But every now and then you produce a photo that you know is good and it feels great.

There is a guideline which is 1024 pixel (jpeg), which is pretty big on a screen. I use 800 which is fine.

I recently did a fair bit of research on this site before buying a Manfrotto 190 xprob, mostly for landscape. I have regularly used the extremely adjustable column when I can't position the tripod quite where I want it (say next to water or a big boulder) as the column can be adjusted to a horizontal position and be used to 'reach' sideways. Also as Bruce says, I couldn't imagine doing without a column for height changes. Certainly I have not been disappointed by this tripod.

Noise lurks in the shadows. You can't escape it! As it is a fact of life I would concentrate more on getting the

exposure right. In your picture, if the face were correctly exposed then the noise issue would not be noticeable You

probably need a flash there to get both face and sunset exposed corretly or you will get (as in this picture) an over-

exposed sky and an under-exposed face.

 

Also, you have not mentioned whether this is a RAW image or if you are taking jpegs for example; this will also

effect the way in which subtle tones are rendered. Unless there is a good reason not to (e.g. not enough space on

your card), take the picture with the highest quality setting you can.

On a 400D:

 

I use the 17-40 for landscape - a great all round lens for that purpose. Feels rugged. Great results. People often talk

about the benefits of having something wider but if anything I tend to want the opposite i.e. to have a longer range to

pick out details in a landscape.

 

I use Canon's 50 / 1.8 for people, mostly using natural light - It's noisy and feels like it will fall apart in your hands but

the combination of sharpness, weight and aperture means that it is astonishingly good value (I have a limited

budget!) ... I love the results and also love using a prime for people work as losing one thing to think about helps me

focus my mind on the subject.

Will's last point is very important. Hard disk failure/corruption is only a part of the risk and much more common is

computer theft, fire and flood and that means that essential data kept on a remote server, off site or at least in a well

hidden strong box. You need to assume that this sort of disaster will happen to you; a local image/copy of your hard

drive does not protect you (but does create a handy transportable version of your hard disk for data thieves to share

with their friends!).

 

 

With regards to Ghost, your inbuilt System Restore is the starting point for sorting out problems caused by dodgy

applications or instability in your OS; it's worked for me a number of times. I used Ghost for a while and found it very

resource-consuming, it slowed down computer start-up and generally wandered round dominating the OS e.g.

interacting with Adobe Bridge's cache to cause crashes in Bridge. If you are sold on keeping a complete image of

your hard drive then I have been told there are indeed some very good open source solutions. For straight data

backup to an external drive I use Microsoft's neat and simple SyncToy, it's great.

The most common reason for complete loss of data is probably pc theft, fire or flood. I keep a copy of all original images and finished prints on DVDs and keep them safe. I also use an external drive to back up all data which I keep hidden.

 

I have in the past taken images of my drive but gave up on the basis of the risk being relatively low and the recover relatively painless (as long as the data is safe) i.e. reloading a bunch of software.

 

On-line backup seems like a good idea but I've not investigated cost yet.

If you are a digital person and in to landscape then HDR is great. It can only be used with a tripod as several images need to be taken at different exposures and then merged but it is a fantastic technique for some purposes ... I imagine it is irrelevant in a studio though where you have complete control over the lighting and hence the dynamic range.

I'm not sure what you're budget is but I have been using Canon's 17-40L for landscape work and it is great. It is expensive in relation to the camera but good lenses will outlive generations of cameras and make a big impact on the quality of the picture. You'll find a lot of very positive discussion on this lens on this site and a lot of truly exceptional photos taken with it.

Advice so far is spot on. Also, if you've invested in CS3 then get a good book such as 'Real World Photoshop', it's a

hell of a weight but essential if you are really interested in developing your skills. I don't use jpeg other than for e-

mail/web and like the others I try to stay 16 bit for as long as possible. Also, good RAW manipulation is an important

part of the workflow for some photos, especially where detail in shadows and highlights needs to be recovered. Have

a play with it and see if you can extract some detail in the highlights and fur texture on mummy bear's head for

example. Good luck!

Personally I find the main categories are often a natural fit with ones interests. I love the simple natural beauty of the

woods and hills around my home, so landscape is as good a tag as any. I also love taking picture of kids,

so 'children' as a category is only natural. Derivative or cross-category tags are a fantastic way to create more

interest and creativity (and are alive and kicking in the no words forum) but they are a lousy generic starting point and

will have no relevance in a giant community of photographers.

Somewhere back there Jordan made a point that I agree with which is: isn't it all about individual expression. It's as personal a decision as what goes in the frame to start with. Fortunately there is a huge range of views on the topic, otherwise we would be lookig worringly like the 'establishment' dictating what is acceptable or not.

 

Another point is that the title is 'detachable'. Ultimately, if a photo is succesful, but has an awful title then the title can and often will change. I wonder how many titles of art in various forms are original titles? Personally I use literal titles because a) I don't think 'deep' suits my work and b) it would seem a bit pretentious given the standard of my photograpgy!

I use the "B&W adjustment layer" approach for simple tones.

 

That said I am tempted to get away from the computer and experiment with less geeky approaches; you can apparently stain very successfully using teabags! There was a recipe in Black & White Photography magazine in the UK this month ... I'm tempted to give it a go but am not sure how it will work (I use Ilford Gallerie papers). Obviously there would be infinately less flexibility and choice in this process but it might give a more traditional feel to prints as it covers the entire page including the borders and the back (with no ink cost!). Has anyone else has tried mixing wet toning/staining processes with digital prints?

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When you say 'rate' I'm not sure if you mean put them on photo.net (or other site) as part of your assessment. If so I would be very careful about how much credence you give the results as they can be pretty haphazard. Also friends will not give you a professional opinion and may tend to flatter you and/or lean towards images that are cliched. Also some photos may only work as part of a series and have limited individual merit.

 

I can't claim to be anything like an expert but at present I'm working on the theory that it's a balancing act between listening to others, personal vision and objective study of images that you love yourself.

In you rearlier work there seems to be artifacts probably caused by successive jpeg compressions. You shoud try starting with RAW for capture (or as large a file as possible) and primary colour, curve manipulation and perhaps some initial sharpening.

 

And Matt is right about colour spaces, generally you would only use sRGB right at the end and only for web postings, and a bigger colour space for capture/manipulation (plenty of debate around about the best one). There is loads of good information on this site about use of colour spaces and sharpening. Also, nothing works better than some study ... a good book and some experimentation. Again, you'll find lots of recommendations on the site for most common software packages. Don't lose heart though, it is a big subject and at the end of the day an image will need different levels of sharpening depending on the final output (e.g. generally need more for printing than screen); you can only learn through painful effort and I'm nowhere near yet (I have the opposite problem to you!)

Would it be fair to say that it's just another software tool; as good a candidate for producing fine art as anything else? or put another way, it's the artist that produces the art not the software. Some fine art looks for realism and some explores the abstract, and all points in between; HDR can be an ingredient at both ends of the scale.

 

I bet that if/when they invent the camera that captures HDR in a single shot then it will be adopted in two shakes of a lambs tail and the techniques we are using now will be confined to specialist forums of purists and lovers of historical techniques!

 

HDR is here to stay and will, no doubt at all, contribute to much fine art work (and a lot of rubbish as well!) ... as an additional note I find it sad, if predictable, that there seems to be stigma attached to this new technique; I bet various 'fine artists' are slow to admit using it for fear that it might diminish the credibility of their protfolios.

Harry, might be worth considering prophoto colour space, depending on what your input space is. The R2400 has, I

believe, a wider gamut than Adobe 1998 for certain colours, particularly yellows. Some helpful articles:

 

http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/phscs2ip_colspace.pdf

 

http://schewephoto.com/sRGB-VS-PPRGB/

 

Note that some people say that there no point moving to prophoto unless you are a professional canary

photographer! My view is that memory space is cheap and printer/ink technologies will improve, so best to do work in

the widest possible space ... although quite frankly I'm not a good enough photographer to notice the difference (I

might be one day though).

 

(Charles, Interesting note on the formulas ... probably best not to risk the copyright issues, but I'd love to give test it

myself).

Steve, yes you are right. I experienced the problem back when I was just converting straight from raw to tiff (probably 8 bit!). I have since put some time in to studying and am now making much greater use of the raw processing capability in canon raw and more recently ACR and I now do as much as I can, if not all, in 16 bit. I will go back to one of my problem images and try again, making better use of the available information. For interest the image I had in mind was this one, taken on a Canon 400D:

 

http://www.photo.net/photo/7155815

 

I was tring to enhance the natural graduation in sky tones from light at centre left to dark at the edges; I stopped short of where I wanted to end up because of banding.

Thanks everyone. A great help.

I am just starting to experiment with HDR in CS3. I have read posts on the pros and cons of its use, other options

that are available (software, layer masking etc.) and have decided to see what works best for me. I do have a

question though which I can't readily find an answer for (and which I hope isn't too stupid!):

 

Much has been written about HDR for capturing an extended range of tones but can it be used to capture more

information where the tonality is very flat. Misty days are an example, where you get a very 'tight' histogram which

when extended too far will be very prone to banding when manipulated too much in CS3; will several bracketed shots

combined give you more flexibility in expanding the available pixels over the whole tonal range?

 

Thanks for your help!