Veiled
by paganini

Comment:
Thought i had seen that funny showerhead bulb before in one your lotus shots. This photograph is just beautifully controlled and probably quite a challenge to do. It's one of the best photographs i have ever seen on this site. This to me is photography: pure, simple, beautiful; no monkeying around with gimmicks.

Veiled
by paganini

Comment:
Congrats on finding a lotus! What exactly is the difference between lilly and lotus? All i can say is that this is a beautiful work of art. And i say that after looking at this pic for a long time.

Reflection of Lillies
by paganini

Comment:
Very, very good. Even though this is a beautiful picture, it is the, almost impossible looking, reflections that make it special. Beautiful colors and composition and the ripples in the back make for a nice touch. Great work.

Profile
by paganini

Comment:
This close-up is beautiful and gives a good view of the P's head and detail of the feathers. Somewhat unfortunate that the detail in the dark feathers is somewhat lost. That's nitpicking but when you do a close-up such as here that's what a viewer might expect. Like the abstraction of the background dof. Fine composition and, as usual, Velvia-good colors.

Watkins04.jpg
by kirbic

Comment:
Very nice image. Nature is very, very difficult to shoot well. Any chance to get a bit more detail out of the foreground left rock?

Watkins09.jpg
by kirbic

Comment:
After reading your 'selling points' for shooting in raw, i visited your profile page and saw these pic. These are the type of pic i love to shoot as well. Don't know whether you shot this in RAW but presume it would be an ideal candidate for RAW. (water, highlights on stone and very light sky, although not yet 255 value sky yet). I have ruined many good shots of darkish scenes (lots of trees and so on) because there was some light sky peeking through that came out as 255 value. Hmmm, i believe we discussed this on a thread some time ago abt graduated nd filters, which i haven't purchased yet. What RAW help overcoming such problems or would a grad. nd filter still be called for? Anyway, i never have a better idea for what scenes it would be definitely worthwhile to shoot in RAW. For other type of shoots i may stay in superfine in order to save a lot of processing time. Does this sound about right?

Secondly, would a grad ND filter actually help with this particular shot since the light sky covers only a small corner of the image???
Replying to my questions here on your pic would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Anyway, nice shot. You might try to darken upper, uppermost greens with hue/sat. Alternatively, you might consider cropping off just about the top of the rocks. It would make for a stronger, more serene image.

prey
by grigrigirl

Comment:
Very dramatic image. Considering the 'eye-level' (midway in the momument) here, this tombstone, and you, must have been standing on the edge of a very steep ravine in order to get the clouds way below eye level.

Message edited by author 2003-07-28 12:47:38.

glowing oak
by grigrigirl

Comment:
comment deleted

Message edited by author 2003-07-31 00:35:29.

Reflection of Longs Peak
by paganini

Comment:
Why does the G2 at F8 have more dof than 10D at f16? It's, however, your next sentence that i meant. Sometimes you want definition from foreground to far background for the shot to work and have the most impact. Actually, with mountains in the background, that's often the case.
It's this shot i was thinking of yesterday when i took those shots of the baby seal. Remember the other oops-shot from the other day of bay/Bellingham/Mt Baker? Actually, that was pretty much the background for the baby seal shots. I thought it would have been a spectacular shot of having that seal (but sharp :) on the rock in the bay and be able to see the city and the mountains clearly in the distance. Trust me, i tried. Even if i had been able to come closer to the seal, there would have been too much blur for the shot to work.
Similarly, yesterday, i took some shots, mainly unposed, of a Native American girl standing in the water (will put them in my portfolio tomorrow or so). I tried to put her in the context of the beautiful landscape. Well, it's somewhat akin to you saying to 'find an interesting foreground for the beautiful landscape behind'. But i think i ended up with some unsatisfactory hybrids that are neither sharp portrait nor landscape. So, some of those shots i ended up cropping just to end up with half decent 'portraits' but that's not what i was after. I just think i made the wrong decision and should have gone for the girl and forget about the landscape behind her.

Silky Water
by paganini

Comment:
lol. It's limitations such as these that make nature photography so very hard and i truly appreciate nature photographs that are perfection. They don't come about easily. What i can conclude then is that this shot was untakenable (unless one has a death wish) in-camera. Since the image is really fine, i would have no qualms to save it by doing some darkroom editing. All the detail seem to be in it so it shouldn't be hard. You need that left rock to frame the fall but, at least to me, the darkness of the rock overpowers.

Have you seen this? //www.wacom.com/tips/tip.cfm?ID=62&STEP=1&category=Photoshop

That is a handy non-destructive way to d&b. Besides, i have gotten lots of good PS tips from that site, forgot to visit it recently so i missed the above handy tip until someone posted it this afternoon.