The Photography Thread
12-24-2011
, 06:13 AM
Does anyone post photos in this thread anymore? Anyway I was bored and worked on a few photos I never had the time to process when I was traveling. I also re-edited some that I manually blended instead of just throwing them in HDR like I used to. Here goes...
Thailand:
Nepal:
Malaysia:
Cambodia:
Laos:
Thailand:
Nepal:
Malaysia:
Cambodia:
Laos:
12-24-2011
, 07:15 AM
12-24-2011
, 01:09 PM
12-24-2011
, 02:22 PM
12-25-2011
, 03:21 PM
12-25-2011
, 03:47 PM
12-26-2011
, 04:46 AM
Thanks! I also really like this one too, not just because of the composition but because of how difficult it was to get to. I hiked, waded, and scrambled up this river flowing down from the himalayas and I had to cross some pretty sketchy terrain for like an hour and a half, way off the trail. Where this photo was taken was a far as I could possibly get. I piled a bunch of rocks together in the freezing ass cold water to form a makeshift tripod so I could take the shot. I still wonder if I'm the only person to have ever taken a picture of that particular waterfall. I like to think I am
Then on the way back my foot slipped while downclimbing and I fell like 15 feet or so into the rushing water. That was scary as ****! Fortunately I left my camera on a ledge right beforehand cuz I knew that part was super sketch. Fun times! haha and you still didn't spell his name right! Looks like you are going to have to post some photos in here to make up for this blunder
But yea I was in Thailand on and off for a bout 3 months early last year. And now that the holidays are about over and its cold and ****ty out I'm about ready to head out again. I just need some money first...
12-26-2011
, 10:20 PM
Icy lake I almost fell into
Mt. Ranier
There were forest fires all around in Oregon, which gave the sunset a crazy red glow.
Smoky sunset
Zooming in and out
Nobody wins a marmot fight
N. Cascades National Park - panorama
Proxy Falls close up
Just to give an idea of what the full Proxy Falls looks like - it's the most amazing waterfall I've ever seen.
Snow cave that we had to crawl through the icy water on our hands and knees to get the shot
Falls near Crater lake
12-26-2011
, 11:53 PM
12-27-2011
, 04:46 AM
Some cool pics Suzz! I found the close up of the jagged ice to be particularly eye catching. I love the textures. I also really liked the first one, the ice cave, and the zooming in and out flower picture. I've also never tried that before, but I will now!
So was all of this taken in the 3 sisters wilderness? What was your set up? Everything shot on a tripod and autobracketed?
Not gonna lie though I feel like some of these photos could use some additional work in post. Here's some of my thoughts...some are kind of nitty so hopefully I don't come off as too big of a dick!
#1 - I find that blown out section of the sky quite distracting as well as the slight haloing around the mountains. This was an HDR right? Can you keep the foreground and manually blend in a properly exposed shot of the sky? The composition is great though.
#2 - focus looks a bit soft
#3 - That foreground is wayyy too dark and the and the upper left part of the sky needs some work as well. If you are not autobracketing or using filters getting the full dynamic range of a shot like this is going to be extremely difficult. Also composition wise I think it would work better if you shot lower and closer to the flowers so that their white petals can contrast starkly against the dark midground area, rather than against the white snow.
#5 - I don't like the banding around the sun. Also maybe a bit more sky and a little less foreground.
Ice cave - I'd work on trying to get rid of the blown out highlights in the stream. Also maybe adjusting the white balance on the foreground to make it a bit less blue. Stylistically I would also shoot this around f13 to get that nice sunburst effect. Freakin cool shot though.
Jagged ice - agree with scratchy to boost the contrast. and maybe do a bit of sharpening. Might make a cool B+W as well.
Last one - What happened here?! Crazy banding in the sky and super underexposed foreground. I mean that stream leading the viewers eye into the distance would look cool if I could actually see it.
Well hopefully this was somewhat helpful
So was all of this taken in the 3 sisters wilderness? What was your set up? Everything shot on a tripod and autobracketed?
Not gonna lie though I feel like some of these photos could use some additional work in post. Here's some of my thoughts...some are kind of nitty so hopefully I don't come off as too big of a dick!
#1 - I find that blown out section of the sky quite distracting as well as the slight haloing around the mountains. This was an HDR right? Can you keep the foreground and manually blend in a properly exposed shot of the sky? The composition is great though.
#2 - focus looks a bit soft
#3 - That foreground is wayyy too dark and the and the upper left part of the sky needs some work as well. If you are not autobracketing or using filters getting the full dynamic range of a shot like this is going to be extremely difficult. Also composition wise I think it would work better if you shot lower and closer to the flowers so that their white petals can contrast starkly against the dark midground area, rather than against the white snow.
#5 - I don't like the banding around the sun. Also maybe a bit more sky and a little less foreground.
Ice cave - I'd work on trying to get rid of the blown out highlights in the stream. Also maybe adjusting the white balance on the foreground to make it a bit less blue. Stylistically I would also shoot this around f13 to get that nice sunburst effect. Freakin cool shot though.
Jagged ice - agree with scratchy to boost the contrast. and maybe do a bit of sharpening. Might make a cool B+W as well.
Last one - What happened here?! Crazy banding in the sky and super underexposed foreground. I mean that stream leading the viewers eye into the distance would look cool if I could actually see it.
Well hopefully this was somewhat helpful
12-28-2011
, 05:44 AM
Pixel Bender is a free PS plugin which is somewhat addictive
12-28-2011
, 12:12 PM
See bold
Quote:
Some cool pics Suzz! I found the close up of the jagged ice to be particularly eye catching. I love the textures. I also really liked the first one, the ice cave, and the zooming in and out flower picture. I've also never tried that before, but I will now!
Thanks. Yeah the ice cave was nothing to look at from the outside - just looked like a patch of snow over a creek. If our guide hadn't been there I'm sure none of us would have noticed it. I really wish I'd gotten the jagged ice in better focus. I seemed to have a lot of trouble focusing this trip for some reason. Here's a shot to give you an idea of the snow cave size:
So was all of this taken in the 3 sisters wilderness? What was your set up? Everything shot on a tripod and autobracketed?
Well some of the shots were in Mt. Ranier and N. Cascades National Park but most are around 3 Sisters. Here is a the tour itinerary - which is just a rough guide - the fires dictated where we could and couldn't go. I have a Nikon D-80 (3/4 frame sensor) with the Nikon upgrade 18-135MM lens and a Tamron 10-24MM (I think) wide angle. Most shots were handheld. All bracketing was manual but the purple flowers with the mountains is the only one where I combined more than on exposure (with a little help from mikekelley).
Not gonna lie though I feel like some of these photos could use some additional work in post. Here's some of my thoughts...some are kind of nitty so hopefully I don't come off as too big of a dick!
No not at all. I want all the criticism I can get. Obviously my Photoshop skills are very primitive compared to you and scratchy. But I'm starting to learn a few more of the basics. Right now 90% of what I do in Photoshop is just make a curves adjustment layer then mask it out for the part of the pic I don't want to apply it to. Sometime I play around with exposure adjustment layers and sharpening. But I never seem to be able to do much with sharpening. I think I might be doing it wrong.
#1 - I find that blown out section of the sky quite distracting as well as the slight haloing around the mountains. This was an HDR right? Can you keep the foreground and manually blend in a properly exposed shot of the sky? The composition is great though.
Yeah I like the composition on this one and the next one the most. I don't know if I have any of these with a good sky. No HDR - just single exposure. The sky was total washout the whole Three Sisters part of the trip. But I definitely see the halo now. This is just a few adjustment layers and I think some color stuff to bring out the red in the mountain. For a few of these I sat down with a pro photographer. But then messed with them later as well when I didn't like some of his artistic decisions. The halo is probably my fault for doing a quick and dirty mask.
This one was at dusk and just supposed to be a test shot for when we came back at dawn. I told one of the other guys on the trip "there are no test shots, you never know when you're gonna get a great one at an odd time". And lo and behold this ends up being one of my favorite shots of the trip. Dawn sucked because the lake iced over at night (so no reflection) and there were no clouds again so we didn't get much color.
Also I almost fell in the lake when trying to step out onto that little island you see in the pic. Like a moron I thought I could see the bottom when in reality I was just looking at an ice shelf a few feet down and the actually lake was some 50' deep. My whole leg went in but I managed to pull myself out with the leg that was still on the solid ice. When the guide told me how deep it was I got pretty spooked. He said I probably would have gotten hypothermia. Note to self: don't **** around with ice. I'm going on a 6-day backpacking trip with him to the Tombstone Mountains in the Northern Yukon this fall. I promised him I wouldn't take any dumb risks.
#2 - focus looks a bit soft
This is one I spent a lot of time on with the pro photographer but didn't like the way it came out so I undid some of his stuff. I agree the sky still looks kind of cartoony (one thing I'm starting to become more and more averse to is when things look too "shopped" to me).
I think I might just start over but keep the mountain and blend that back in. He did an unsharp mask on the mountain that really made it pop. This is one of the really intimidating things about Photoshop to me. It feels like I will never learn all the little tricks like unsharp mask or layer blending etc. - much less master them enough to know how and when to use them.
#3 - That foreground is wayyy too dark and the and the upper left part of the sky needs some work as well. If you are not autobracketing or using filters getting the full dynamic range of a shot like this is going to be extremely difficult. Also composition wise I think it would work better if you shot lower and closer to the flowers so that their white petals can contrast starkly against the dark midground area, rather than against the white snow.
I will work on this one some more. I almost threw this one away because the flowers were too dark. But then lightened them up and thought it looked really good. When shooting I think I was just goofing around as I don't have any other shots of this.
#5 - I don't like the banding around the sun. Also maybe a bit more sky and a little less foreground.
For this one I did my standard curves adjustment layer on the sky and liked that it made the sky blood red. The fires really made the sky light up. I really should have taken my tripod out in the field for these to get a good exposure of the yellow and green blooming sage brush and a different one of the reddish-orange sky. This was before the tour when I was driving into Sisters, OR. I have an aversion to my tripod for some reason when it's just me and I'm not sure if I'm going to get a great shot of just goofing around. I have a super light backbacking tripod that's kind of a pain to set up. I plan to get an easier to set up walking/driving-around tripod before my next trip.
Ice cave - I'd work on trying to get rid of the blown out highlights in the stream. Also maybe adjusting the white balance on the foreground to make it a bit less blue. Stylistically I would also shoot this around f13 to get that nice sunburst effect. Freakin cool shot though.
Funny story - on this shot (and the close-up proxy falls shot) I had somehow accidentally set my white balance to "indoors" and didn't notice it. But I liked the blue on both so I kept it (I dialed it back somewhat on the proxy falls close up - but in reality that is still mostly green). I will try to remember the f13 sunburst trick.
Jagged ice - agree with scratchy to boost the contrast. and maybe do a bit of sharpening. Might make a cool B+W as well.
I will play around with it, but like I said I suck at sharpening. I don't have any clue what radius or what all those other settings mean. Here is the raw file if you want to play around with it. I actually have some other cool ice abstract shots from that same spot. I will go back through this weekend and post some more. I thought people would be bored by them. But most of my friends and family who have commented like the jagged ice shot as one of their favorites.
Last one - What happened here?! Crazy banding in the sky and super underexposed foreground. I mean that stream leading the viewers eye into the distance would look cool if I could actually see it.
Yeah I was trying to do something kind of artsy fartsy with this one - where you don't notice the stream at first, but then it's kind a fleeting ghost/dreamlike view of the stream. I'll see what I can do with the banding.
Well hopefully this was somewhat helpful
Yes please anytime. None of us are ever going to grow as photographers if we just blandly compliment each other all the time. And it's pretty obvious my post-skills are very raw, so I need all the guidance I can get.
I think one problem for me from this trip is I took some 3300 pics, and it was really exhausting going through them all. To the point where once I finally whittled them down to the keepers, I didn't really want to go and do a lot of post-work on them. But I don't want to stop taking 1000s of pics because I still am learning what works and what doesn't - and I still every now and then get an amazing shot when I didn't think I was going to get anything.
The dead trees pic from my Glacier trip might be my 2nd favorite pic ever, and that was one of those where I was just walking around in the middle of a nice puffy cloud day taking tons of shots. Here's a link to the writeup from that Glacier trip if anyone missed it the first time: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/79...s-pics-898317/
Thanks. Yeah the ice cave was nothing to look at from the outside - just looked like a patch of snow over a creek. If our guide hadn't been there I'm sure none of us would have noticed it. I really wish I'd gotten the jagged ice in better focus. I seemed to have a lot of trouble focusing this trip for some reason. Here's a shot to give you an idea of the snow cave size:
So was all of this taken in the 3 sisters wilderness? What was your set up? Everything shot on a tripod and autobracketed?
Well some of the shots were in Mt. Ranier and N. Cascades National Park but most are around 3 Sisters. Here is a the tour itinerary - which is just a rough guide - the fires dictated where we could and couldn't go. I have a Nikon D-80 (3/4 frame sensor) with the Nikon upgrade 18-135MM lens and a Tamron 10-24MM (I think) wide angle. Most shots were handheld. All bracketing was manual but the purple flowers with the mountains is the only one where I combined more than on exposure (with a little help from mikekelley).
Not gonna lie though I feel like some of these photos could use some additional work in post. Here's some of my thoughts...some are kind of nitty so hopefully I don't come off as too big of a dick!
No not at all. I want all the criticism I can get. Obviously my Photoshop skills are very primitive compared to you and scratchy. But I'm starting to learn a few more of the basics. Right now 90% of what I do in Photoshop is just make a curves adjustment layer then mask it out for the part of the pic I don't want to apply it to. Sometime I play around with exposure adjustment layers and sharpening. But I never seem to be able to do much with sharpening. I think I might be doing it wrong.
#1 - I find that blown out section of the sky quite distracting as well as the slight haloing around the mountains. This was an HDR right? Can you keep the foreground and manually blend in a properly exposed shot of the sky? The composition is great though.
Yeah I like the composition on this one and the next one the most. I don't know if I have any of these with a good sky. No HDR - just single exposure. The sky was total washout the whole Three Sisters part of the trip. But I definitely see the halo now. This is just a few adjustment layers and I think some color stuff to bring out the red in the mountain. For a few of these I sat down with a pro photographer. But then messed with them later as well when I didn't like some of his artistic decisions. The halo is probably my fault for doing a quick and dirty mask.
This one was at dusk and just supposed to be a test shot for when we came back at dawn. I told one of the other guys on the trip "there are no test shots, you never know when you're gonna get a great one at an odd time". And lo and behold this ends up being one of my favorite shots of the trip. Dawn sucked because the lake iced over at night (so no reflection) and there were no clouds again so we didn't get much color.
Also I almost fell in the lake when trying to step out onto that little island you see in the pic. Like a moron I thought I could see the bottom when in reality I was just looking at an ice shelf a few feet down and the actually lake was some 50' deep. My whole leg went in but I managed to pull myself out with the leg that was still on the solid ice. When the guide told me how deep it was I got pretty spooked. He said I probably would have gotten hypothermia. Note to self: don't **** around with ice. I'm going on a 6-day backpacking trip with him to the Tombstone Mountains in the Northern Yukon this fall. I promised him I wouldn't take any dumb risks.
#2 - focus looks a bit soft
This is one I spent a lot of time on with the pro photographer but didn't like the way it came out so I undid some of his stuff. I agree the sky still looks kind of cartoony (one thing I'm starting to become more and more averse to is when things look too "shopped" to me).
I think I might just start over but keep the mountain and blend that back in. He did an unsharp mask on the mountain that really made it pop. This is one of the really intimidating things about Photoshop to me. It feels like I will never learn all the little tricks like unsharp mask or layer blending etc. - much less master them enough to know how and when to use them.
#3 - That foreground is wayyy too dark and the and the upper left part of the sky needs some work as well. If you are not autobracketing or using filters getting the full dynamic range of a shot like this is going to be extremely difficult. Also composition wise I think it would work better if you shot lower and closer to the flowers so that their white petals can contrast starkly against the dark midground area, rather than against the white snow.
I will work on this one some more. I almost threw this one away because the flowers were too dark. But then lightened them up and thought it looked really good. When shooting I think I was just goofing around as I don't have any other shots of this.
#5 - I don't like the banding around the sun. Also maybe a bit more sky and a little less foreground.
For this one I did my standard curves adjustment layer on the sky and liked that it made the sky blood red. The fires really made the sky light up. I really should have taken my tripod out in the field for these to get a good exposure of the yellow and green blooming sage brush and a different one of the reddish-orange sky. This was before the tour when I was driving into Sisters, OR. I have an aversion to my tripod for some reason when it's just me and I'm not sure if I'm going to get a great shot of just goofing around. I have a super light backbacking tripod that's kind of a pain to set up. I plan to get an easier to set up walking/driving-around tripod before my next trip.
Ice cave - I'd work on trying to get rid of the blown out highlights in the stream. Also maybe adjusting the white balance on the foreground to make it a bit less blue. Stylistically I would also shoot this around f13 to get that nice sunburst effect. Freakin cool shot though.
Funny story - on this shot (and the close-up proxy falls shot) I had somehow accidentally set my white balance to "indoors" and didn't notice it. But I liked the blue on both so I kept it (I dialed it back somewhat on the proxy falls close up - but in reality that is still mostly green). I will try to remember the f13 sunburst trick.
Jagged ice - agree with scratchy to boost the contrast. and maybe do a bit of sharpening. Might make a cool B+W as well.
I will play around with it, but like I said I suck at sharpening. I don't have any clue what radius or what all those other settings mean. Here is the raw file if you want to play around with it. I actually have some other cool ice abstract shots from that same spot. I will go back through this weekend and post some more. I thought people would be bored by them. But most of my friends and family who have commented like the jagged ice shot as one of their favorites.
Last one - What happened here?! Crazy banding in the sky and super underexposed foreground. I mean that stream leading the viewers eye into the distance would look cool if I could actually see it.
Yeah I was trying to do something kind of artsy fartsy with this one - where you don't notice the stream at first, but then it's kind a fleeting ghost/dreamlike view of the stream. I'll see what I can do with the banding.
Well hopefully this was somewhat helpful
Yes please anytime. None of us are ever going to grow as photographers if we just blandly compliment each other all the time. And it's pretty obvious my post-skills are very raw, so I need all the guidance I can get.
I think one problem for me from this trip is I took some 3300 pics, and it was really exhausting going through them all. To the point where once I finally whittled them down to the keepers, I didn't really want to go and do a lot of post-work on them. But I don't want to stop taking 1000s of pics because I still am learning what works and what doesn't - and I still every now and then get an amazing shot when I didn't think I was going to get anything.
The dead trees pic from my Glacier trip might be my 2nd favorite pic ever, and that was one of those where I was just walking around in the middle of a nice puffy cloud day taking tons of shots. Here's a link to the writeup from that Glacier trip if anyone missed it the first time: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/79...s-pics-898317/
Last edited by suzzer99; 12-28-2011 at 12:24 PM.
12-28-2011
, 08:17 PM
This is your biggest problem I think. You know full well the advantages of shooting on a tripod vs shooting handheld, so stop being lazy and bust out the damn tripod!!
Last edited by cardsharkk04; 12-28-2011 at 08:23 PM.
12-28-2011
, 10:34 PM
Here's what I got adding some contrast and a little sharpening. But yea its hard to make an ice shot that isn't tack sharp look great. I think I like Pele's edit the best.
12-29-2011
, 11:07 AM
Long time since my last post in 2p2. However I am now more interested in Photography than poker, so I will probably be posting here now and then
To begin, and as a way of introduction, here is a collection of images that I did during the storm in Estonia:
You can see more information about the pictures here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ad_stud...7628618773725/
By the way, Pele02, nice to see you in here (If you still remember me)! Do you guys hang out here most of the time or are there other places on 2p2 or other forums for good photography discussions?
To begin, and as a way of introduction, here is a collection of images that I did during the storm in Estonia:
You can see more information about the pictures here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ad_stud...7628618773725/
By the way, Pele02, nice to see you in here (If you still remember me)! Do you guys hang out here most of the time or are there other places on 2p2 or other forums for good photography discussions?