Are You Serious Jo

Right, did some portraits today, colours look great on my monitor but a bit flat on my laptop, so hopefully they aren't really that way. My new favourite thing is fog, the colours are really good, no shadows and with the 50mm wide open plenty of light. All are manual focus on my 50mm 1.7 prime, pentax K7 body, all ISO 100. F is between 1.7 and 2.8, camera doesn't record which as the lens can't talk to the camera. They are also deliberately "cool" I didn't want any warming so no temp increase. Highland cow heifer, I debated over the crop a bit, ended up leaving a bit to the left of the sky as it wasn't balanced when I cropped in towards her face. Shutter speed 1/640 Young deer buck I hand raised, shutter 1/800and 1/1250 respectively. Highland cow, very hard to get a decent portrait as the horns just won't fit in! SS 1/640 Shetland horsie, that isn't distortion her muzzle is really wide, but I think the contrast might be a bit flat. SS 1/640 One I've taken about a month ago, a DOLers dog at herding, SS 1/800, ISO 100 80-200 zoom at 80 I think.

I'm at Hungry Jacks and of course forgot to bring the jpeg of the disaster I was stubborn and as a result spent the entire day waiting for photoshop, jpeg all the way next time :laugh: I got some other nice shots for the challenges though so I am uploading them now.

This is a really tough category, nothing like someone noticing you are taking their photo to make you want to fall in a crack I'd say that qualifies as PJ kiris?

But you don't get the wide angle feel, which is why we are hurting our brains doing this :laugh: It's like a DD, a cross between tele and wide angle, except no puppies get hurt in the making of. My pc is hurting but that doesn't matter! I should do what is suggested and shoot in jpeg to cut processing times.

Crap, I didn't see that on any other tutorials I had read, and it didn't do it on any other of the stitches or with other lenses. I'm still putting it together to show what happened. I'll do some test shots with this lens as well as all the panos I've done with auto WB have been perfect, even the three shot stitch this morning was ok with the 50. Might be just this lens that needs it on some shots. Wish it didn't take so damn long to process! ETA, I am confident you are right about it being WB and have just been lucky with stitching and exposure on the other shots. I'll go back to that spot and redo it to see if that is it.

I usually leave WB on auto and adjust in camera raw because I always forget to change it between shoots. I've got CS5 so use that. I just tried a two and three stitch shot and they were fine, but they were also a lot further away (trees in fog). The one I'm trying for the bokehrama practise is some moss on a rock, I was fairly close to it (about 3 or 4 foot away) and then shooting around it and it seems to be the area I'm closest to has exposure issues. I'm thinking it has to be something to do with the plane of shooting somehow changing the way the light is hitting the sensor. Even though I tried to keep it at the same level as I went through the shots. There are forty all together so I have to stitch in small batches. Bugger, it gives me a good bokeh at 1.7 but if it's going to do this it won't be much use. It will take a while but I'll do all the stitching and try to get a low res version that will upload,. Once I have it all on one canvas I can see if it is just a problem when it's close to a subject.

I can't remember looking at them and going geez these are all crap :laugh: I'm about to throw my bike in the bushes and have a massive childish tanty because it takes so long for my pc to do my stitching and my 50mm prime has done something funky and I CAN'T STAND IT WHEN I'M ANNOYED AND TECHNOLOGY MAKES IT WORSE!

The old judges are the worst, they know nothing of new techniques. I put my HDR fruitshop in and even wrote high dynamic range on the back. He had no clue and his comment was he would like to see the original photo to see what I'd done (I put it in digital manipulation). Since I'm trying to get a portfolio together so I can use wins to jump me into a higher level for competitions I'm playing their game. You have to be happy with what you produce first and foremost though, so there has to be a compromise between your artistic vision and the rules when entering comps.

So I went out this morning to grab some shots in the fog. Used my old 50 prime and was pretty sure I didn't touch the green button while taking all the shots (all on manual). I do the first stitch on sopme of the shots and it looks like exposure has shifted, but exif in bridge tells me they are all the same You can really see it in stitching and it's also done a really crap job of stitching too. I can't even post an example as I can't upload. Ok, this is really not good I tried a different set and same issue, there is noticeably different exposures even though the exif says the exposure is the same. Does anyone know what might be going on? Manual prime 50mm 1.7 and everything set on manual. I'm going to go ahead and do the full picture and go down and upload later to show the example.

oops

Ugh, net keeps dropping out so I'll just reply in general. I really love space in some pictures, to me it puts the subject in context. But I'm also aware that the old dudes who pull me up on things have a better eye than I do so I'm working on getting my pictures to a certain level (rule wise) before I break all the rules on some shots. Photography is so subjective, I love low key saturated images so my default is always boost saturation and contrast. So your editing (collies) may be perfectly fine, just not what I'd do. Some things though, like blown whites have to be fixed, they aren't preferences. It can be impossible to fix if really blown. It isn't easy to get black and white correctly exposed on one animal so the way to get around it is expose for the white. The general rule is expose for the highlights and let the shadows take care of themselves. It is easier to pull detail from shadows than restore detail from blown whites, so change your exposure to get the whites right, then fix the black during editing. If you have an animal that is relatively still bracket your shots then layer them and selectively erase. this can also be done on landscape when you don't have filters and too much difference between sky and land.

Ugh, net keeps dropping out so I'll just reply in general. I really love space in some pictures, to me it puts the subject in context. But I'm also aware that the old dudes who pull me up on things have a better eye than I do so I'm working on getting my pictures to a certain level (rule wise) before I break all the rules on some shots. Photography is so subjective, I love low key saturated images so my default is always boost saturation and contrast. So your editing (collies) may be perfectly fine, just not what I'd do. Some things though, like blown whites have to be fixed, they aren't preferences. It can be impossible to fix if really blown. It isn't easy to get black and white correctly exposed on one animal so the way to get around it is expose for the white. The general rule is expose for the highlights and let the shadows take care of themselves. It is easier to pull detail from shadows than restore detail from blown whites, so change your exposure to get the whites right, then fix the black during editing. If you have an animal that is relatively still bracket your shots then layer them and selectively erase. this can also be done on landscape when you don't have filters and too much difference between sky and land.

Ahhh, ok, I know nothing of lightroom, I heard clarity and immediately thought of camera raw :laugh:

Yep, even if you use the clarity slider you still have to do a resharpen if you've reduced noise.

Ok, first shot, needs to be cropped, way too much background. I think you have some highlights that are blown, you need to fix those and colour the tongue. No. 2, I love that angle, but too much vacant area, crop a bit tighter, also blown whites, digital tends to do that to white, it doesn't handle it as well as film. 3 and 4, crop right down and darken a bit in 3, 4 possibly but I think you could get away without it. I'd increase saturation on them as well.

Your focusing has definitely improved. If I were you I'd stick with spot focusing (I also use spot metering for animal shots) and practise getting the eyes, holding the shutter halfway and recomposing. It's too hard to try to get toggling right while you are learning and trying to remember all the other things. One of the best ways to learn editing is by photoshop magazines, especially better photoshop techniques. The church looks quite good for handheld. Looks like it needs a bit of a contrast boost and maybe up the saturation a little. Also, do you sharpen at all? Pretty much every digital picture needs it. I use the high pass method: do all editing then duplicate the final layer (ctl, alt, shift, e will give you a merged layer on top of all other layers without actually merging) then go filter - other - high pass, you'll see the amount of sharpening on the grey bits, then change mode of top layer to either overlay, soft light, hard light or vivid light. is much better than the unsharp mask.

Is anyone using noise ninja?

I can't upload from home, I'm on mobile broadband here so I have to go to Hungry Jacks to do it, but I have one dog portrait to upload, one I took about a month ago.

It seems to be a polarising thing, people either love it or hate it, like HDR. Some of the landscape ones are stunning, plus I saw some really nice dog ones on a flickr search, wish I'd saved them.

Try this link The Cloontang is in there as well, it's Sam Hurd's flickr.

That was a slow shutter speed as well tlc, so if you were hand holding that was probably the reason it is a bit soft.

I actually think the hardest part is finding a good setting that shows the DOF effectively. If you are careful to overlap when shooting then the technical side is not hard, just stitch and process normally. Gap, have you seen the portrait of Alec Baldwin, it is my fav Brenizer shot, I love it so much and it's one of the shots that got me hooked on the method. I'm going out on Saturday to find a spot to practise this again.

White and black dogs should be banned I say :laugh:

Did you see the pic I posted trying it out? The composition is crap so don't look at that, it was just to see if I could get the feel. Have you got yours up online anywhere? You could pm me the link.

I'm thinking of grabbing one of those very fast 135mm primes, they are very cheap and have good bokeh on some models.