To the Lighthouse
by ErikV

Comment:
Now that's a sweetheart! Textbook deep DOF. Congrats on ribbon.

Three: End of Summer
by mpeters

Comment:
This, on the other hand, is textbook :-) (see my comment on Joe's shot) Congrats on the red, and for the record I've stood right THERE too (see my first comment on Joe's shot, early on)

Rolling Fog
by jdannels

Comment:
Well, how about that :-) Non-textbook winner! Way to go, Joe.

Somebody's Dirty Rear-end
by Blackbox

Comment:
Fabulous! A nude of Clark!

Rolling Fog
by jdannels

Comment:
That's a hell of a view of my favorite bridge; I shot from that exact spot once myself.

It does raise certain questions re: the challenge topic, inasmuch as nothing in the foreground is particularly close, so we're arguably not really seeing "deep" DOF. On the other hand, it's shot with a long lens, and it wasn't easy to get the DOF as deep as you HAVE gotten it :-)

Anyway, I'm not an angels-on-heads-of-pins guy, so I just ignore that navel-gazing and give you a nice score. You're certainly MUCH closer to nailing the challenge than all the shallow-DOF shots I'm seeing :-)

Lake Fog at Sunrise
by hahn23

Comment:
Comment removed

Message edited by author 2009-09-21 23:51:36.

Pearl Dawn
by Ecce_Signum

Comment:
Lovely image, but I'm having a really hard time deriving any relevance to "9" from it. Am I being blind, or dumb? Feel free to PM me on this :-)

Kate Chandler Morgan (1944-2009)
by mm767cap

Comment:

Originally posted by mm767cap: Originally posted by ineedauniquename: any chance of seeing the original 5 before combining, this HDR lark is driving me nuts a bit and it would be interesting to see the starting material. Actually, it's not an HDR image. I manually blended the 5 exposures. 2 for the sky, 1 for the sun, 1 for the water, and 1 for the rocks/house. If you saw the RAW files, they wouldn't look like much because each area is exposed differently. For example, on the image where the sky is exposed properly, its completely black in the bottom half of the frame. The choice to expose this is either to use Graduated ND filters, which I didn't have, to do HDR, which I tend to not like, or to manually blend the exposures which is what I did here. Hope that helps explain it better!

First, pity about the DQ, but as you say it's not that big a deal in the context of the image and what it means to you, which is good.

However, regarding the statement above ("It's not an HDR image...") you couldn't be more wrong. A "High Dynamic Range" image is exactly what it is, and you accomplished it the old-fashioned way, by tedious and detailed hand work. In that, you're in good company, as this approach is ideal for producing "natural looking" HDR images. With the HDR programs out there, there's another (and often very useful) element at work, the enhancing of "local area contrast", and it's basically the exaggeration of that effect, combined with an extreme flattening of the tonal range, that produces thew "cartoonish" effect that so many incorrectly believe *is* HDR.

You did a great job here,a nd congrats on that :-)

Liquid Lavender
by Carlo21

Comment:
Came out great Carlo! Congrats on top-10.

Kate Chandler Morgan (1944-2009)
by mm767cap

Comment:
awesome! great story and shot. i'm up there right now, typing from the library in Lubec :-)