tom_anderson9

Just a thought - see if she might have a stuffed toy or something she holds or held dear in the shot, something that will spark a rememberance of happy times in the past if they had that.

Anna,

 

I like the shot, to me it looks like a well printed image, not something heavily manipulated...and I'll chime in with everyone else that feels that "not looking like HDR" is nice.

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To those that might say that all this processing isn't pure, I'd suggest that it used to be that landscapes were all shot on b&w film, carefully exposed and bracketed, then carefully developed to control contrast, then printed with care to dodge and burn as required. The pioneers of landscape photography were all about using the technology available at the time to fit reality into the print.

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To those that might say that this has to be done by X method with Y steps or it's just not correct, I'll toss out a quote attributed to E Weston - "I cannot believe I learned anything of value in school unless it be the will to rebel." Part of the reason that these folks were good was that they followed the rules that they wrote, and forged their own path. I'm not suggesting not to take in all the great information here, just to use it to add to your toolkit as you go forward. In looking at the shots you've put up, it looks like you're doing that already.

Looking at the exif for the original shot, it's a D300 and written with CS3. Does Photoshop handle the raw imports of the D300 well, or could it be wrecking the curves? Some of the pixels in the shadows above her ear have a 0 value for blue.

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I'm not the brightest bulb when it comes to this digital image stuff, but I'd bet the original shot didn't have the blue channel pegged at 0 on the low end and the red channel pegged at max on the high end. Have you taken a look with the Nikon software?

B&H has always been great for me. I've been buying from them for 20 years, most recently some lighting equipment a few weeks ago. B&H has been around longer than the Internet has.

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I would suggest B&H, Adorama, or another respected photo company before Amazon, if only because their customer service people, and even sales people actually understand cameras.

Alex - I don't think the third attempt looks plastic, and based on her eye shadow I don't think the "electronic makeup" you've added is in bad form. I would adjust the lips, though, to me they stand out too much. Bring the color close to the pink she has in the original, soften them to somewhere in between where you have them now and what you did to her skin, and soften the transition from lips to face a bit. With that, you'd have wild hair framing great eyes.

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Off topic, but if you had the chance to shoot her again I'd try from 2-3 times further away and a bit higher to get a better perspective.

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Which is better, the original or the retouch? Well, I'll put it this way... If she were my friend, I'd put the original picture on my desk. But if I were going to give her a copy of the photo, I'd give her the retouched one. Hope that makes some sense.

Why not go through the photos you've taken in the past two years, and check the focal length on the shots where you like the composition? Then, of those, which you wish had an out of focus background. Then base your choice on that info.

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You might find you shoot 80% of the time between 50mm and 130mm, for instance, so you could look for a 2.8 zoom in that range.

In 35mm, my favorite for airshows was a 100-300/4. A 200 just wasn't enough reach. On a 1.5-1.6x camera, I find 300mm too long for aircraft - I just can't frame well with it, and I'm not as steady with it. The 70-200 would be perfect, in my estimation.

A suggestion - Have in mind what image or style the company wants to project for the event. It may be warm and friendly, or competitive, fun, or funny. If you shoot the CEO, or your boss, or someone in between, it's a good idea to put them in a light that they want to be in. The photos should also reflect the purpose of the event. Is it team building? Stress relief? A reward? It wouldn't hurt to ask someone what they most hope to get out of the event, and help with that.

I have the Tokina 50-135/2.8 in the Nikon mount, for my Fuji S3, and I love it. It is very sharp, and it's well built. There is a review on photozone.de of the lens in both Nikon and Canon mount.

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As to focus speed, it's apples and oranges to compare Nikon to Canon, but on the Nikon it's pretty fast for a screwdriver focus lens. As to build quality, it's on par with the old metal Nikons, and better than some of the current plastic Nikons. Focus and zoom are very smooth. I have a mix of Nikon, Tokina, and Tamron glass, and prefer the Nikon and Tokina.

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For me, for portrait, it's perfect. I don't need high speed focus or VR. I've used it for action/sports, and it's a little slow focusing but otherwise fine.

This may not make sense, but being used to not making sense, I'll try anyway. This is purely subjective, and pretty much non-technical, because I'm nowhere near skilled enough to make that image.

 

As a single photo, I don't like it. In general, the shot makes me want to see more, as if it should start by being cropped tighter, or that it's not complete. So I took a look at some of William's other photos. That led me to realize something (rusty gears grinding). As part of a group of photos, or an album, I would really like this photo. To me, the very thing that makes it not stand alone makes it compelling - that I want to see more - the brides face, more of the architecture, more detail in the dress, and color.

 

To me, it's like one potato chip, and that's causing me to look at individual images in a completely different way. Probably old hat to all the pros, but a new trick for me. Thanks!

To me, photography is a hobby, but I've been doing computer networking professionally for 20 years or so. I saw this as an opportunity to give back a little to a great group, so here are some ramblings on my thoughts and experiences with data backup and data loss:

 

The two most common causes of data loss are human error and drive failure. To me, it's a toss up as to which one is more common.

 

Human error can be reformatting or copying over the wrong drive, copying over data with something else, deleting the wrong directory, etc. Drive failure can happen at any time, but is most likely to occur with brand new, or relatively old drives.

 

RAID systems are much more reliable than single drives, but RAID systems do sometimes fail with the loss of all data. This is typically caused by a controller or backplane problem. Over the years, I've seen hundreds of drives fail, but only a handful of RAID arrays fail.

 

Hard Drives are much more reliable than CD, DVD, or tape in day to day use.

 

The most common cause of unrecoverable data from CD and DVD is from a disk that wasn't burned well in the first place. Causes of this are bad media, and drive/software combinations that lead to unreadable disks. Important disks should always be checked in another drive before they're considered good.

 

I can't stress the human error part enough. Have a consistent system. Label everything well. Don't do backups when you're tired or not thinking clearly. If possible, automate backup systems, but check them regularly, and verify that automated systems are backing up the files correctly.

 

A joke in the computer industry is that they call it "backup software", not "restore software", because the backup part is the only part that always seems to work.

 

If you've lost your primary data copy, and are doing a restore, probably the best first step is to take a break.

 

Whatever backup system you use, you should rotate or archive the backups. Otherwise, if your system blows up while doing a backup, you risk losing your original and backup at the same time.

 

When judging the sanity of a large computer system, some of the questions I ask are: Is the data stored on RAID? Do the systems have UPS? (battery backup) Is there an off-site backup system? Are the backups verified? (checked to see that the data on the backup matches the original) Are the backups rotated? If you're paranoid, you have two independent backup systems. I've never heard of anyone having unrecoverable data loss if they did all of these things. I have experienced RAID failure where the first backup set was unreadable, and we had to use the second set. That's a bit nerve racking.

 

If a process involves work on a system that is likely to wreck it - repartitioning the drives, major software upgrade, etc - standard best practice would be to make an additional, independent, disk backup of the system before starting the risky process.

 

Have I lost data myself? Yep! Taking shortcuts, being lazy...the usual causes for poor performance. Have I lost a customer or employer's data? Not yet.

 

Hope this helps.