A Little Technique
As promised, here are a few images from this past Sunday…
I think I finally figured out the whole moving water thing. Now, this is not a stellar photograph, by any stretch of the imagination. But, I did figure out a recipe for making those silky-water waterfall pictures. Of course, this is from the A2. (There are still no film images. I gotta get on that, so I have stuff back in time for the next session…)
For the photogeeks out there, this was obviously on a tripod, as the exposure was 1.6 seconds, at f:9.0 (with -1/3 stop exposure compensation dialed in). There was also a Cokin P-type polarizer (164) in place.
These next two aren’t particularly stellar, either, but they illustrate a “happy accident” kind of technique, and it’s something that I’m going to attempt to remember.
The first one was taken with a fairly powerful flash, the second was not. I was attempting to see if I could separate the flower from it’s not terribly close, but too bright and detailed background. In each case, the aperture was the same — f:3.5, wide open for the lens on the A2, at the equivalent of 200mm. The first image was at 1/250th, with flash, and the lower image was at 1/125th, with no flash. I was approximately 20 feet away from the flower blooms. No image processing or cropping was employed on either image, except to resize for the web site.
My preference is for the first image, where the flower bloom pops out of the background. There’s still a little detail in the background with the flash image, but it’s clear that the bloom is the subject of the image.
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.
As an aside…
Ya know, it’s that particular green that’s beginning to bug me. Almost every digital shot I’ve seen of a landscape captures that exact color green, and it just doesn’t pop. Maybe it’s just the default sRGB gamut, or something, but there’s just not enough saturation there. That moss on the rocks and the foliage should just be lush, but it looks dusty. I’ve noticed it in your Minolta pics and Will’s D70 shots.
Or have I just been shooting too much Fujichrome lately?
Well, that would be AdobeRGB, not sRGB, for starters. Also, I did nothing to the image except crop and resize. No color or levels correction.
I shot Velvia at the same time, but I haven’t gotten it processed yet. It will be interesting to see how that comes back.
Fujichrome has always tended to accentuate greens. Why else would it be in a green box?
Seriously, though, many people don’t like Fujichrome for just that reason — the greens are too green for some.
I find that the CDD sensors act a lot like current Ektachrome — pretty much “flat” as far as color response is concerned. Ektachrome E100 or Elite Chrome 100 are about the most neutral films on the market right now.