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04/28/2006 07:49:04 PM · #426 |
Took a stab at the contrast masking. It was pretty cool to so easily select highlights and shadows. What wonderful keyboard shortcuts. I made an action to do it all for me, layers and all, but I will probably try it again using layer masks on levels layers rather than pixel layers. (I would use curves, but I have had mixed results with curves and I find them a bit "fiddly"!)
On this one, I tried selectively leveling shadows and highlights, and even did selective velvia processing as well (applying the channel mixer differently to the two layers). Perhaps too much color, but what do you think? Better or worse?
 
I guess now I'll have to try it on a more flatly lit image!
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04/29/2006 01:04:54 AM · #427 |
The masked version is noticeably better in the foreground, different-but-npt-necessarily better at the horizon, IMO.
R.
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04/29/2006 03:57:26 PM · #428 |
Originally posted by Bear_Music:
Just to keep vertical vs horizontal open for discussion, here's two shots, made at different times, of the same subject. They also use "leading lines", so they lead us to our next assignment.
 
Robt. |
While overall, I prefer the vertical shot, I think they both work and fit perfectly into David.C's take on vertical and horizontal shots.
That is... "The main difference I see is the horizontal leads the eye back and forth while the vertical leads the eye up and down -- both can lead the eye into the depth of the scene".
I will say, though, the one thing in the vertical shot that I think works better in the horizontal shot is the strong horizon. I'm finding that the vertical shots that work best for my eye tend to not have strongly defined horizons. Of the shots that do have strong horizons the ones that appeal to me most have the horizon strongly placed in the upper 1/3 of the frame. Certainly not the rule, but, seems to be the case, most of the time.
Message edited by author 2006-04-29 17:54:49. |
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04/30/2006 05:40:19 AM · #429 |
Okay...
Stdavidson and nshapiro both gave very well-reasoned discussions earlier about horizontal vs vertical in the landscape. I have nothing to add to what they said (thanks, guys; you covered all the bases).
I'd like to comment, however, that leaving aside issues of the height of "subjects" (tall cacti want vertical pictures), for me the overwhelming plus of the verticallandscape is that is has more power to create depth in the image, for reasons both of them pointed out. There's also a way vertical works well with long telephotos in landscape shooting, where you have horizontal bands of contrasting color/texture/tonality that can be stacked or layered in a very compressed image that has little depth.
Here are two examples of layering with the long lens without depth, and one example of depth without sybject using the wide angle lens:
  
**************
The next assignment is compositional: Landscape Using Leading Lines
Pretty much everyone is familiar with the "rule of thirds", but it's far from the only compositional model available. "leading Lines" is a very powerful mode of composition in landscape photography. Most people think of it as having some sort of line leading the viewer from outside the image to the subject, but that's only one way of using them. A good example (a great example, actually) of that sort of image is Crabappl3's staggeringly beautiful "Road to Denali":
But leading lines can be used to take you from the subject deeper into the image as well. My skiff shots in the post preceding do that. Leading lines, basically, involve journeys; they take you from "here" to "there" within the image, they direct your passage through the image. Here's an architectural shot of mine from the 1970's, scanned from a print, of the border crossing at Tijuana, Mexico. Here, the subject itself IS the leading lines :-)
In another scanned architectural shot, again the leading lines are most of the "subject", and here they lead you into the restaurant exactly as the designer intends them to do, visually:
Leading lines can be implied as well; you don't have to have all the dots connected if they make a pattern of themselves:
So let's post up some leading lines, and go on some journeys together!
Robt.
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04/30/2006 12:58:46 PM · #430 |
Bump for the day crowd: New Assignment in Previous Post.
R.
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04/30/2006 01:04:33 PM · #431 |
My biggest problem is finding landscapes that are worth looking at. But I may give it a try anyway. :-)
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04/30/2006 01:39:48 PM · #432 |
Originally posted by Melethia:
My biggest problem is finding landscapes that are worth looking at. But I may give it a try anyway. :-) |
As Mies van der Rohe said (or was it Le Corbusier, too lazy to look it up) "God is in the details." If the broad landscape is unappealing, get up-close and personal. In a drought? Show us the effects. Lacking "beautiful" color? Show us stark & sere. It doesn't matter where you are, there's always a sense of place you can exploit if you take the place for what it is.
I'm not directing this at you, personally, but in general so many people tend to believe the only landscapes worth shooting are the ones full of grand gestures and dramatic scenes, and I just don't buy that. Plus, just because we're calling ourselves a "landscape" thread doesn't mean we can't have buildings or other structures in our shots.
Go forth and seek! You will be rewarded!
R.
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04/30/2006 01:45:28 PM · #433 |
One of my higher-rated shots ...  |
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04/30/2006 01:49:20 PM · #434 |
Originally posted by GeneralE:
One of my higher-rated shots ... |
That's a perfectly (and literally) straightforward leading line, yup :-) I bet if you were doing this over you'd level the horizon, right?
Robt.
Edit to add: quick stab at a remake, trying to tone down the greenish'cyan cast, leveled the horizon, cloned out the "thing" on the left, added gradients top and bottom to accentuate depth. Artifacts unavoidable at low res. Ideally, working from original, we'd be able to contrast mask it and get a hint of detail from the pier and other good things as well, but it's not yielding anything from this posted example.
Message edited by author 2006-04-30 14:18:56.
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04/30/2006 01:50:40 PM · #435 |
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04/30/2006 04:25:41 PM · #436 |
OK, here's an attempt. I saw the assignment when I got up this morning, so took the camera with me on my bike ride. We rode River Road, which is one of my favorite places to ride, but we're about out of the "window" in which it's possible to ride. Starting Memorial Day weekend, the "toobers" take over. Yes, they spell it that way. I think because it resembles another "-oob" word, perhaps. At any rate, it seems to successfully "toob", massive quantities of alcoholic beverages are required. Combine that with a very narrow road and no shoulders, and cyclists find elsewhere to ride until the "toobers" give it up at the end of the summer.
After all that, here's the original:
And here's the edited version:
I think after looking at the edited version, I may go back and re-crop. I almost prefer the original perspective better. Comments and criticism most welcome! |
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04/30/2006 05:21:23 PM · #437 |
I'm lurking and I just wanted to say this is really one of the greatest threads on here! Started reading it last night and it's like one of those novels that you can't put down.
Good job bear. |
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04/30/2006 05:23:42 PM · #438 |
Oops...wrong thread. Sorry.
Message edited by author 2006-04-30 17:24:13. |
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04/30/2006 05:58:14 PM · #439 |
After some inspiration from this thread, I revisited a couple of my Yosemite photographs from 2004. Man, what a difference! Thank you so much bear, these will now be printed and put up on my wall!
Jamie
 
& from Tunnel Point
 
Message edited by author 2006-04-30 18:04:19. |
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04/30/2006 07:32:46 PM · #440 |
It's good to see everyone having fun :-) Progress being made on all sides. There's more to the shot than meets the eye. Persevere, citizens!
R.
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04/30/2006 07:53:53 PM · #441 |
It was no good for the "no subject" category, but my cloudy overpass ought to be OK for Leading Lines ...
Original:  Edited:  |
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05/01/2006 05:14:40 AM · #442 |
We had a break in the rain this afternoon, so I went and spent a couple of hours walking thru a small wooded area with a stream running thru it. The intention was to find leading lines, but along the way I found flowers with butterflies and bees, geese and ducks and even a snake I almost stepped on, the clouds from the remnants of the storm that had just blown over and toward the end of my time out the new storm blowing in. Had enough time to shoot that I actually filled the 1GB card for the first time.
I get home and start the card downloading to the computer and my wife and go for a drive with the kids and watch a movie. I sit down to look them over and they seem so noisy. Oh no! Checking my camera I find I have made a super-noob mistake and left the camera on ISO1600 from the previous night of chasing my kids around the house. :(
I'll see if any are worth salvaging for this thread later -- right now I'm too aggravated with myself to go thru them.
---
In the meantime, since you said this was a good time to dig up old images I've never been able to do anything with, here is an image with leading lines from an outing last October. The outing this image is from was the very last time I was able to use my old Olympus, and very nearly the last shot it took. I feel it has potential, but what do I know. :D Anyway, after over a dozen tries I have not been able to pull anything out of it at all -- least of all what I was looking at when I raised the camera.
The scene I was looking at, at the time I took the picture, the clouds over the trees were quite prominant in a muted sort of way from the setting sun to the right. From flat to shaping and finally to raking light on the treeline as it bends around the lake was bringing out the early fall colors very well. All with the reflections in the lake gaving a symetry to it all.
So, is it just me not being able to bring what I saw out of the image, the camera not able to capture it (max quality with min in camera processing) or something I did wrong when exposing it?
Image (orignal, 2MB)
David
Message edited by author 2006-05-01 05:16:29.
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05/01/2006 09:08:07 AM · #443 |
Bear, I know this was probably mentioned early but may bear (heh) repeating - the editing steps using different blending modes are NOT permitted in Basic Editing, right? But are permitted in Advanced editing. (Note to self - re-edit open challenge entry before submitting....)
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05/01/2006 02:27:57 PM · #444 |
Originally posted by Melethia:
Bear, I know this was probably mentioned early but may bear (heh) repeating - the editing steps using different blending modes are NOT permitted in Basic Editing, right? But are permitted in Advanced editing. (Note to self - re-edit open challenge entry before submitting....) |
Yes, that bears repeating, thank you. We're not constrained by any DPC rules whatsoever in this thread; I count on the participants to realize which techniques are invlaid in basic editing. Hell, we may end up soing some stuff that's not allowed in ADVANCED editing at some point, though I doubt it...
R.
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05/01/2006 03:08:33 PM · #445 |
Originally posted by David.C:
Image (orignal, 2MB)
David |
Is this any closer to what you were seeing?
I am getting some edge artifacting here, which I could clean up if I took the time, but it's a relatively laborious project to do so. This was a very difficult image on which to work, and to be honest I'm not sure why. It clocked up very easily, and even slight color tweaks showed sudden increases in artifacting.
This was done with one set of straight contrast maks, then a second shadow mask at soft light and faded. Hue/sat was used as much as possible, but the yellow channel was hard to run without making the sky and some of the water very strange. I'm making it a point to do all this without local, hand-made selections, which anyway would create real problems in the tree/sky interface, which is where I really want to be bale to use color adjustments (the trees, that is). Anyhow, finally I made a separate, duplicate layer of the whole and dodged the brighter areas on the foreground rocks and then brushed them with the saturation sponge to bring up a hint of color. Added and faded a sky gradient also.
It's a work in progress, that's for sure. Whatcha think?
R.
Oh yeah, I rotated it too to level it up...
Message edited by author 2006-05-01 15:10:30.
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05/01/2006 03:20:56 PM · #446 |
Hi Bear!
Would the water line be considered a leading line?
Or would the distant landscape be the leading line? Or neither?
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05/01/2006 03:27:30 PM · #447 |
Originally posted by kdsprog:
Hi Bear!
Would the water line be considered a leading line?
Or would the distant landscape be the leading line? Or neither? |
Not really, to the waterline. It's just a diagonal element. Diagonal elements are not, in and of themselves, leading lines. The "distant landscape" is what we call a "horizon" (grin) and it most emphatically is NOT a leading line.
Think of a leading line as a strong compositional element that directs the viewer's eye to somewhere, or from somewhere. For the purposes of this exercise, we'd really like it to be THE dominant compositional mode. It's of course possible to have all sorts of "mini leading lines" in, say, a "rule of thrids" composition, but's that not really what we are talking about. We want that line to rule the shot. We want the shot to be but a shadow of itself if the line were not there. Refer back to crabappl's example, "The Raod to denali"; take out the road, it's just another nice landscape.
Robt.
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05/01/2006 03:30:25 PM · #448 |
Ok Bear how about this one:
I think it has a strong leading line, but something about it is just off.. |
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05/01/2006 03:35:29 PM · #449 |
I think I may be getting it... let me know if I'm wrong, LOL!
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05/01/2006 03:42:07 PM · #450 |
Originally posted by MQuinn:
Ok Bear how about this one:
I think it has a strong leading line, but something about it is just off.. |
I think your leading mine leads the viewer right out of the image and doesn't compel him to linger and explore the image. |
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