Syous, I just couldn't help but play around with your image. For starters, I think cropping out a good chunk of bottom part of the frame is a good idea. Like others have said, the foreground isn't really that interesting. BUT just the top part of the dirt track curve seems to almost mirror the sand dune curve. Here's my version with recrop, some contrast adjustments, and a bit of photoshop.



Thoughts?

Also I think your friend is wrong about just capturing the dune. Unless you're capturing some interesting abstract geometric forms, just a picture of a sand dune (well this one in particular) is also boring as hell.

As for the sunset, if I'm not bracketing, I underexpose just enough just to make sure the sky isn't clipped. Then I rely on ACR (or whatever RAW editing program you like) to bring back as many of the highlights and shadow details as I can, which works surprisingly well with a full frame sensor. A multiply layer in PS also works wonders for flat looking skies.

lol, I dunno man, I can hardly operate my handheld camera on live view when I'm in weird spots and can't see through the viewfinder. Getting the framing, focus, and exposure right on these robotic cameras seems like it would be pretty f'ing tough. I mean that beetle thing looks like it can't even drive over a stick! I haven't looked into it, but it doesn't seem very useful on a safari. I can see some utility in the mosquito though.


Seems like a somewhat self defeating attitude. I see lots of unique and inspiring stuff posted on 1x and 500px all the time, wildlife stuff included.

Once you're good enough to get some of your photos on there, then start worrying about flying robot cameras and beetles and ****.

Most likely they took several shots from a tripod then blended them together with either HDR software (which can be really good but you have to know what you're doing to avoid the usual pitfalls like halo-ing) or Photoshop.

You can also usually use different exposures from the same shot and blend them together with Photoshop or HDR software - depending on the dynamic range of your scene and the camera. When I don't feel like hassling with the tripod I just bump my camera up to where the whites (usually in the sky) are almost clipping or just clipping a little (depending on if there is any detail in them). This will leave the foreground (usually) too dark but you can boost the exposure in camera RAW or photoshop and blend that back in to the original.

But if you want the shot to be the best it can be, use bracketing and blend after the fact.

I really like your shot btw. Sometimes you don't need all the detail in the world in the foreground - the sun beam effect you've got going is even more interesting imo. I think if you just crop out some of the sky, which really isn't adding much - to get that 2/3 ratio (not that that is an iron-clad rule, but it works here) - I think you have a really nice image. Bringing up more foreground detail would make it look less realistic imo and detract from the cool sun beams.

Actually looking at it a little more, I would probably crop out the big rock in the foreground as well to make it more of a panoramic ratio. The middle 1/3rd of the shot has all the interesting stuff. Also to highlight the sunbeams and light-splashed trees and plants, I would darken the parts of the foreground that are in shadow more until there's just a hint of detail. Well maybe more than a hint.

I agree with you about capturing more than the dune itself. Your version is pretty close to my suggestion of a 6:7 crop. I don't think el cid would like what you did to the ruts on the track , but it really emphasizes how the shadow on the road mimics the shadow on the dune. Sky might be a bit too dark.

Why did you crop off a bit from the right?

thanks for the well-written post. It's helpful and always great to revisit fundamentals (I always forget )


I love and hate you. This is awesome. I was getting really frustrating with my photos too, so thanks for the inspiration There's hope!

5D Mk II, I presume? (Canon has 4 different "Mk II' camera bodies.)

Others have already posted good advice about bracketing, exposure and Lightroom profiles. One other consideration is colour space. As we discussed with cardsharkk04 back in December, if your camera and editing is in AdobeRGB and then you display the resultant file on the web, the colours will look duller and bluer. Unless you will be printing with a service that uses AdobeRGB, you can simplify your life and get better looking web presentation by setting your camera and editing software to use sRGB. If you'd prefer to preserve the wider colour gamut of Adobe RGB, when you produce a JPEG for display on the web, remember to convert it to sRGB.

One thing that your dune photo and your sunset photo have in common is too much dark, dull, uninteresting stuff in the foreground. Often this is the result of using too wide a lens (too short a focal length). When you use a wide angle lens to take a picture of distant subject matter, you either need something in the immediate foreground to provide interest, or you need to control how much foreground is actually in the shot, for instance by taking the picture from a very low position, by pointing the camera upwards a bit, or by cropping. Voyeurism pointed out the advantages of using a longer focal length for compression when there is nothing interesting in the foreground. IMO, the wider the focal length, the more you have to pay attention to what's in the foreground, because it is given so much more prominence. And that often means you need to make more vertical and lateral adjustments to shooting position with a wide angle lens. Don't always shoot from a standing position. One of my favourite photography accessories is a simple folding camp stool: 3 intersecting metal legs supporting a triangle of canvass a few inches off the ground.

Another thing is that in both, distant vegetation doesn't seem very sharp. Are you not stopping down for these shots, or shooting handheld?

What can we learn from the two pics you posted of what you were trying to get? Both of them had the horizon closer to the bottom of the frame, since the coloured sky was a main subject. Both of then had something interesting and prominent in the foreground. Both of them had something extending upward into the sky to avoid leaving wide open spaces. And finally, (but this may be harder to notice) both had vary saturated colours.

Here's a 2.4:1 crop (widescreen cinema standard aspect ratio) of your photo that tries to address some of the above. It has very high colour saturation, and nudges to contrast and brightness.

I dunno, I was just messing around thought it looked a little better.

I wanted to make the spine of the dune a little more centered. Ideally it would be in the exact center, but then I felt I was cutting off too much of the dirt track, so I just chopped off a little bit instead. But now as I look back I think I was wrong and chopping off even more as to center the spine of the dune looks best. And it gets that non-uniform chunk of sand out of there as well.



centered

Syous, stand a few feet to the right next time!

No worries! You were headed in the right direction, ya just needed some nudging

BTW nice edit DTM. I'd desaturate some of that extra bright yellow haloing around the sun and it looks good to go.

Ah, I see. I think you're right - if you're going to go that route, better to go even further as you now have.

Thx. Nothing I can do about desaturating yellow locally. My limited PP toolset only lets me to do framewide adjustments. I'll eventually get around to buying Lightroom or an equivalent. PS is further off in the future.

I like this - particularly the panoramic crop, which I think works really well for this image.

Now that I'm finally responding from an actual computer (with Photoshop installed, no less) I tried something different:



This is just a single Camera RAW filter applied in Photoshop (so you could make exactly the same adjustments with only Lightroom), plus one 'Overlay' layer (which is my favourite way of adding a vignette). The unflattened TIFF file is here in case you want to download it and see what I did to it.

Kids today just don't appreciate how tough it is doing all your post processing in MSPaint

If you have the time, it would be really instructive if you could take us through the steps you took.

You had MSPaint?!? Luxury! When I was a lad, all we had was a home-made hex editor!

I made you a video. The final image ended up looking a bit different to the one I posted previously, so I must have made some of the settings a little different the second time round, but all the steps were the same.

That's awesome Voyeurism. I should make one of those showing the clone-painting technique. Did you use camtasia to make the vid?

Wow! Far more than hoped for. Thanks very much!

Generally very easy to follow and understand.

There were a couple of things I wasn't clear on near the beginning. I wasn't surprised to see you dragging the shadows up, but why go all the way to 100%, and why reduce the highlights at all? What happens, or what are the disadvantages, if you only drag the shadows up, say 50%, and leave the highlights untouched?

I just used the screen recording feature of Quicktime Player since it comes free with Mac OS X, along with the built in Microphone on my Macbook Pro. It's not ideal, as I ended up with a 5.33GB file and I had no way to export it at the original resolution but a lower bitrate or framerate - there is also some background noise (hiss) on the audio that I wanted to remove, but the version of iMovie I have wouldn't let me export at any resolution higher than 1080p so I just uploaded it untouched in the end. If I was going to be making lots of these type of videos I would have to look into some better software, either for capturing in the first place or for editing/converting afterwards.

I guess it's not really a disadvantage, but the highlights will start to clip much earlier as you add contrast, move the white point etc. In this image, the area around the sun starts to clip with the highlights at around -50 if I leave all of the other adjustments made in Camera RAW the same.

As I noted in the video, the reason I do this (Highlights -100, Shadows +100) for most of my landscape shots (really for most of my shots that don't include people) is that it "flattens" the image and pushes all the data into the middle of the histogram - I want to bring back as much detail as I can across the entire dynamic range, and only then start deciding which areas I can throw some of that detail away. This lets me control the level of highlight and shadow detail I want in particular areas of the scene using the graduated filters, brushes etc, rather than making adjustments to the whole image, and I don't have to worry about constantly checking whether the highlights are being clipped with every adjustment.

If I decide while editing that I've taken the highlights too far, I can always go back and readjust it, but that would adjust the highlights globally which might not work for any particular image - for example, I might want the sky to be lighter, but do I also want to bring up the lights of the city, and completely clip the area around the sunset or moon? I'm therefore much more likely to lighten the sky using a more targeted adjustment with a brush (or more likely do it in Photoshop using layer masks).

Actually I like it, takes away some needless distraction.

What is done in the Video on the other hand...

Since it's been a while since I posted any of my own images, rather than just playing with other people's, here are some shots I took last month when my parents visited me for a few days.

Firstly, some shots from Tredegar House, a Victorian stately home not far from Cardiff and now owned/run by the National Trust - these are all HDRs made from 5 exposures and shot with the Canon 16-35mm f/2.8L II and 5D Mk III on a tripod.











Then one dodgy landscape that my mother made me shoot ("It's a pretty scene - I think it's nice!"), but which I knew would turn out mediocre - I do, however, like the composition with the path and the reflections in the water, so I might make an effort to go back and shoot this scene again in better conditions (in the autumn maybe, when the trees still have leaves and the colours are more interesting). This is also a HDR made from 5 exposures, again with the 16-35 on the 5DIII.



And finally some natural light portraits of my parents. My Mum, clowning around in the fancy dress hats they had available for kids at Tredegar House. This is shot with the 24-105mm f/4L on the 5D Mk III, in a fairly dark room using a window directly behind me as the light source.



My Dad, shot in the cafe at the fourteen locks visitor centre on the Monmouthshire Canal. This is shot with the 16-35 at f2.8 and the light is from large floor-to-ceiling windows behind me and to my left.



And finally my Dad again, this time shot outdoors in the Roman amphitheatre at Caerleon. Again, this is shot with the 16-35 at f2.8 using the overcast sky as one gigantic softbox.

time to hop countries: Yoyogi Park, Tokyo

I got really lucky w/these photos. The originals were nowhere near as exciting, but once I applied this filter that brought this green hue + filmy texture to it, they started to look beautiful.

is this cheating? I had something in my mind when I shot these photos but they were nowhere near as good w/out the filter












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The photos below, am I reaching too much? I got made fun of for being like a 4yr old kid w/a camera and shooting stuff like this, like "look mom, art!"

I think you know where I stand on the whole "post-processing is cheating" debate. They're your images; if you think they look better with a particular filter applied, you go ahead and apply it. If someone enjoys your images less as a result of knowing you used the filter, that's their loss not yours. Personally, I like the filter.

The rest of this post might sound harsh, but it was intended to be constructive and I hope that you'll take it in that spirit.

This is the most interesting of these images in my opinion, although I wish you had taken three steps to the left before taking it. It's a nice enough scene but not particularly interesting, except for the kind-of-symmetry of the people sitting on the three benches - given that, I would have tried to do everything I could to emphasise that symmetry and by moving to your left (a) the lines of the decking would have been more symmetrical, and would have been stronger as leading lines drawing your eye to the centre bench, and (b) it would (probably) have placed the fountain in the gap between the two people on the centre bench, which I think would be a stronger composition.

I think this image also has potential. I like what you're doing by using the bridge as a compositional element, but it feels like the couple are the subject of the photograph and I would have liked to see them more prominent in the frame. I might have tried moving forward and to the left, say halfway onto the bridge and right over the handrail, including only one handrail and a small part of the "deck" of the bridge and making the couple larger in the frame.

This is another image where I think you needed to give more consideration to the composition as you were shooting it - I really don't like that the second musician is cut off behind the girl in the foreground. I also think for the story you're trying to tell here the foreground and background are not adding anything, and are therefore unnecessary. I think you need to compose so that you get all four subjects visible, or to go much tighter - possibly something like the red rectangle shown below, with the focus on the singer's face and a shallow depth of field to throw the people in the foreground out of focus.



I think the first one is definitely reaching. Very few of the "looking up sky and branches" images I have seen, from any photographer, are particularly compelling - maybe others feel differently. I often find myself taking shots like this (I mean... I must literally have 50+ shots of leaves/sky, and probably more of tree trunks surrounding me shot looking straight up), I think out of some need to feel like I'm doing something "arty", but they're rarely strong images and I almost never do anything with them once I get them home and imported into Lightroom.

The second image I think is more a missed opportunity - the girl blowing bubbles would almost certainly be an interesting subject, but you need to get in tighter so that we can actually see the expression on her face.

I would suggest going back and look at some of the travel photographs cardsharkk has posted ITT - particularly the ones that have people in them. Without going back and looking, I can tell you that these fall into two categories; those where the person is the subject of the photograph, and those where the person is an element in a wider scene. Then when you find yourself somewhere like this park which inspires you to make photographs, ask yourself what is it that you find interesting about about the park - is it the park itself (bridges, lake, fountains, sculptures, trees, flowers, textures etc) or is it the people in the park?

If it's the people, you're probably only going to produce strong images if they let the viewer connect in some way with those people, and to do that I would suggest that in most cases you need to get in tighter. If it's the park itself, I think you need to focus more on the aspects that make it interesting because for a lot of these shots it could be any park anywhere in the world; that doesn't always mean that the image doesn't work - see my comments about the shot of the benches and fountain - but a less obviously interesting subject does mean that other elements, such as composition and lighting, need to be stronger.

You have to remember that with each image you're trying to tell a story, and for the image to work it has to be obvious to the viewer what the story is because they weren't there in the park when you took it and it therefore won't trigger the same memories that it does for you. Often your favourite photographs are the ones that have personal meaning for you, rather than the ones that stand as strong images by themselves, and it's important to be aware that others likely won't feel the same about them.

One other thing, just out of interest mainly, about the cropping of these images - they're all more panoramic (which is a terrible way of saying longer and thinner) than I'm used to seeing, and I'm wondering if that's the format the camera shoots in (and if so, which camera is it?) or if you made a conscious choice to crop them all in that ratio?

thanks for the criticism, not harsh at all!! Gotta make a lot of mistakes before I get better imo.

Lightroom for some reason is defaulting to a 16x9 crop but I've found I kind of enjoy that so I've been leaving the ratio in instead of taking the crop filter out.

I'm not a technical guy so I don't really understand the reasons for doing and not doing that, but I like the feel and have noticed most of my photos need a crop of some sort anyway.

man that mike kelley photo cracks me up. I've stood in that exact spot, clicking away at jets taking off from lax. I guess that's why he is a genius and I am not one.... yet. Love that arial pick of the freeways. Not sure how he shot it. Doubt he used a drone, looks too high up.