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aobaob ā Pylon II
Published: 2009-06-20 15:54:51 +0000 UTC; Views: 548; Favourites: 52; Downloads: 9
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Description
I know, a bit post-cardy, just getting to grips with my D90.
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Comments: 38
I know this is jsut a 'warm up' shot for your new camera, but I hope critique is still usefull...
It's really a very good photo, it's sharp, well exposed, and is pleasing to the eye, if not particually impacting, and the greyscale conversion has really improved the sky, giving a gorgeous gradient, which would have been lost in a colour photo e.deviantart.net/emoticons/s/sā¦ " width="15" height="15" alt="
The main problem I have with this image is the grass, it's out of focus, but not enough to be artistic, if you just dropped the aperture down to f7-8 the grass would have been in focus, or at least passably so,
Good job!
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Quite an amazing image.
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I like it Alex, particularly the crispness of the clouds.
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Glad to hear it Eric, my new camera is an absolute monster.
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By the looks of this photo, I can only agree.
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again the color here is not doin it for me. dunno what color would work but this one doesnt bring out alot of the sky, which is plays a very big role in the picture
i ISH that damn tower would stand up straight (again, im sure its not your fault but even the slightest angle bothers me to hell. then again im ocd in crazy ways not saying its not close to perfect)
i guess you got something going here but i dont know if you made the best of it or not. i'd have to see more pictures of this area, perhaps be there when you were.
all i know is this: the sky looks deep and blue. let that show in the photo by using a more vibrant color. it will add life to your picture, i guarantee it. these photos with more of nature in them are actually really good but i think one thing you might want to work on is "how can i take a picture that allows what i see to speak?"
not sure if that's what i want you to ask but i think you get my point. overall, you're getting good, this camera is definitely workin lol
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I didn't really want to bring out the sky, I wanted the clouds to stand out again the darker backdrop, there is nothing very interesting about a blank sky. As for the slant of the pylon, it adds tension, and I quite like it like that.
Very good points though, thanks!
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Since now you have very good gear, I will start technical nitpicking. I think it is a bit oversharpened in certain areas. For example there are sharpening halos around the wires over the cloud in the top center area. This is to be expected if you use a normal amount of sharpening on a photo that contains such abrupt tonal transitions, and also becomes much more apparent when the dA software rescales the image because it probably applies some sharpening itself.
My solution in a few pics of mine (e.g. in 'This line is discon...'
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Ah technical nitpicking!
I uploaded the image in 750x750px but dA still resizes it? I noticed the halos as soon as I posted actually, I'll re-fiddle with the picture and as for the blur tool it'll take me a while to learn to love it I think, looking at your work shows it can be a fairly amazing tool. I'll give it a go.
Thanks a lot
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Well, I am not sure that it resizes if you chose 'original size'; I was talking about the general case.
I am not sure that the blur tool is the best way to handle it, so if you find another way, let me know.
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Well when it comes to sharpening I normally give it a strength of 90 to 150 with a radius of 1 on a new layer, then mask off parts that I don't want sharpened. If it needs anymore I may just scrap it, or copy the masked area then refilter it on a 50, 0.5 setting. Another way though is to high pass a new layer then set the blending mode to overlay. But the blur tool is very good for images such as your "This line has been dis..." with little no foreground I'm guessing. The picture just looks so clean!
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Hmm, your method is more labor intensive than mine, which is just to use 'smart sharpening' with a 0.8-1.8 radius and strength of 75%-150%, depending on the pic, after zeroing the sharpening in the raw file. Basically, I increase both parameters until the effects are too strong, then backup from that until the boo boos are not noticeable. In rare cases, I need to do something locally, like using blur tool. (This is for clean, recent digital images. Film requires a lot more fiddling, and old digital files are already sharpened in the camera, so to those I apply little or no additional sharpening.)
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Zeroing the RAW file in RAW software? Interesting.
My photos generally need sharpening, those long bike rides make your arms shake more then usual.
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Well, I use Lightroom (+ PS). With LR, you can keep the files in RAW format, either the camera's own or Adobe's DNG. So I do the basic composition and adjustment in LR, zero sharpening and export to PS, sharpen there, possibly add grain, and finish off back in LR.
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Wow, you must have a lot of time on your hands.
I just downloaded Lightroom, it seems incredibly slow, but I love those selenium tones.
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If you have just imported stuff, it prepares previews of them in the background, which slows down stuff. (There should be a progress display on the top right corner if that is the case.) When importing images, choose 1:1 preview option which speeds up the subsequent processing once they are ready. Some operations are apparently inherently slow, like the graduated filters. On the positive side, there is unlimited undo, even after you leave the program because LR never actually changes the original file, only stores the operations that you used, and reapplies them. Also, there is no save, or open file operations. The individual images are always 'saved' and 'open'. Personally, I wouldn't use PS but it has better control if you want to do extreme things.
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Good tip, seems to work quite well. I have to say the program is very impressive!
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Spot on Alex. I tried a pylon one a little while back but it was crap so I binned it. This works well with all the different textures and the mix of hard industry and nature..
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Thank you very much, I thought the industry and nature aspect might have been a slightly cliched motif. Never knew I lived next to Germany's biggest industrial area.
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Dunno fella... :/
This just doesn't feel quite as aobaob as previous works...
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Hey, I was struggling to get something to upload, hard to get quality every day.
But I know what you mean, I'm not entirely happy with this either, I could have processed it more but... I'll go into the city tomorrow, I'm definately not a landscapes man.
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I still think it's a god image.
And I disagree- I think your landscapes are extremely cool! 
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Well, I wouldn't call myself an architectural photographer either, don't have such an eye for composition.
I just take photos of them because that is what is around me, if I'd have grown up in the lake district or something, chances are I wouldn't see things the way I do today.
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Fair point.
But the fact remains that you mostly take photographs of buildings because you DON'T live in the Lake District.
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Nice sharpness.
Great contrast.
Beautiful clouds.
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