The Photography Thread

[Ginger Tosser]

Tis very nice.



Was bored waiting for the train tonight. So shot the BT Tower (Brum Version)

[charlesr]

The sunset last night down here was beyond awesome. Wish I'd had a camera. The setting was over a deliberately flooded field with totally calm flat water, so the contrast between the complete display above the horizon and the grass-interrupted one on the ground.... Just beautiful.

[Alastair]

The sunsets have been amazing recently Charles down on the south coast haven't they. I'm in the office until well after dark now the clocks have changed though. Fingers crossed for tomorrow.


Monkey Steve, like the image but I think it would benefit loads from a better black and white conversion (unless it was shot in BW on the camera of course!).

Nice urban scene GT, well exposed too to keep the detail in the building and the sky.

Going back to my questions about printing and dpi. I've just been over to see my A3's at the printer and I can definitely say that the one that I only upscaled to 185dpi looks equally as amazing as the ones that I managed to get up to 210dpi. Didn't have any at 300 to compare but to be honest at A3 it hasn't made a difference, I'm so pleased with how they look too

I think at A2 sizes and up then the dpi thing would obviously come into it more but for A3 and below try not to get hung up on it as it's not worth the headaches.

Got to hang the prints tomorrow morning so I'll try to get some shots af it all in situ.

[MonkeySteve]

Monkey Steve, like the image but I think it would benefit loads from a better black and white conversion (unless it was shot in BW on the camera of course!).

Nah it was shot in colour but it didn't really do anything for me, so converted it to B&W. What sort of things should I be looking out for when converting (using this image as an example)?

[Alastair]

Haven't got any software here at work to illustrate my point but I would say it needs a bit more black in the image and possibly some more contrast. You could try just upping the contrast and fiddling with the brightness in the BW version. I assume you just desaturated the colour version to get to BW?

If you use Photoshop you could try the following method to convert to BW though.
It's basically the channel mixer that I forget how you get to (Image->Adjustments->Channel Mixer maybe?). Once in the mixer check the monochrome tick box. Slide the bottom slider down by about 10-15 - I think it's called constant or similar, then start playing with the RGB channels. I find that Red on about 60 is a good starting point and the theory is that Green and Blue should then add up to around 100 when combined with Red. It'll depend on each individual image but it's good to play around with and see what you come up with.

If you don't use PS then I don't know any other software, sorry. And also sorry for being a bit unsure of what's what but like I say, don't have PS on this PC.

[MonkeySteve]

Cheers, I?ll have a fiddle. I?m using PS Elements at the moment, and used the ?Convert to B&W? tool. I tend to fiddle with the contrast and light/darkness of shadows afterwards, but as this pic is quite old (and was taken at a fairly low res) if I fiddle too much it tends to degrade the overall image quality

After the tool has converted the image to B&W it gives you the option to fiddle with RGB sliders so I?ll do some experimenting with your suggestions. Thanks for the info!

[MartyG]

Took this one on the way home, turned out quite nicely I think.



Purposely saturated of course

[Dirty Sanchez]

Over saturated, too much flare, contrast too sharp, no atomosphere. Looks like an in game shot rather than real life.

[Dirty Sanchez]

Not that anyone ever comments on my shots anymore (guess I'm getting stale and staid or something) but here's one that's being printed for the show at the w/e. First go at using flash on people. I have a bit of tracing paper over the end to diffuse and was bouncing it off the ceiling.

This guy had the most striking eyes.

Nice softness to the shadow, well graduated. Has a real 3d quality

[MartyG]

Over saturated, too much flare, contrast too sharp, no atomosphere. Looks like an in game shot rather than real life.

I'll take that as a major complement, thanks.

[Richard.John]

It's been a while since I last posted anything here but I went to Okinawa recently and took my camera.

[Alastair]

Nice work RJ, good to see you back. I like the first one a lot, good use of negative space.

[Richard.John]

Cheers for the kind comments, Alastair. The summer really sapped my enthusiasm but cooler weather brings more photo ops.

[funkydan]

My fireworks photos were a disaster (no tripod or remote, so you can imagine the results!). However, the fairground really caught my eye:









I really like them personally but would appreciate your (kind) constructive comments!

[prinnysquad]

Took this one on the way home, turned out quite nicely I think.



Purposely saturated of course

no atomosphere

pfft. It's very atmospheric as far as I'm concerned. You can quibble about the technical side of things, but atmosphere is a very subjective quality.