Terre Cotta Warriors

pathfinder

Back in June I went to see the Terra Cotta Warriors at the Children's Museum in Indianapolis, one of the only exhibits of Terra Cotta Warriors in the US. Very nicely done, and in looking at the files I shot with a GX7, (m4/3) through glass cases, I was pleased with the image quality at the higher IOS required. I removed the backgrounds as they were filled with lots of people moving about as well as glass reflections

A War Horse statue shot at IOS 4000



Another statue at ISO 4000

Stumblebum

Nicely done!

Wiren

These are really cool!

rwells

Looks like that rig performs well.

Nice shots of interesting subjects!

mercphoto

My 40D can't come close to that! Nicely done.

Richard

Guess I missed these first time around. Nice work. They look like they were shot in a studio, not in a museum, which attests to your PP skills.

pathfinder

Thanks guys. The gradients are CG of course, but the subjects do not stand out as Noisy at all to me - even on my new monitor. I finally quit studying new monitors, and just set up my new LG 31 MU97.

I like being able to tour museums and bring home nice memories in digital files - unfortunately that frequently means shooting through smudged or fingerprint ridden glass cases with lots of extraneous stuff around. One trick I need to incorporate, but have not, is a nice soft rubber lens hood which lets you press you lens hood against the display case and remove lots of reflections. A nice microfibre cloth helps as well.

In the past with film, and maybe ISO 400, it was frequently just way too dark. But with modern cameras - small, discreet, yet capable of ISO 4000 to 6400, lots of possibilities open up, especially as the MFT world begins to introduce f1.2 prime lenses. One could even use a polarizing filter since you have a stop or two to play with


Below is the file of the horse as imported into Lightroom before any editing - as can be seen in this image getting closer to the glass cabinet helps minimize reflections and such, but this file has had no noise reduction in post processing at all

Stumblebum

Thanks for incredible info and tips Jim!!! Ability to process like that must open unimaginable doors!!

lifeinfocus

Very nice!

"CG" ?? That is an abbreviation I don't recognize. Is that http://www.cgtextures.com/?

Thanks

Phil

Sam

Great processing!!

Sam

pathfinder

It's actually very simple to do - Phil, the black and white background is CG, or "computer generated"

It is actually just a gradient white to black in a layer in Photoshop. You can add a bit of noise to minimize any posterizaiton if needed, or a curve to vary the transition of black to white. It can even be a colored gradient is desired, but I find i usually prefer the monochrome gradient more.

The Quick Selection tool lets one cut out most subjects quickly and easily today. Just run them through some plug in to convert to monochrome and voila!

Sam, I took delivery today on my LG 31MU97 monitor - not an Eizo or a NEC, but still a pretty nice screen and a whole lot more pixels than i had before - a real 4K screen.

Sam

pathfinder wrote: »

It's actually very simple to do - Phil, the black and white background is CG, or "computer generated"

It is actually just a gradient white to black in a layer in Photoshop. You can add a bit of noise to minimize any posterizaiton if needed, or a curve to vary the transition of black to white. It can even be a colored gradient is desired, but I find i usually prefer the monochrome gradient more.

The Quick Selection tool lets one cut out most subjects quickly and easily today. Just run them through some plug in to convert to monochrome and voila!

Sam, I took delivery today on my LG 31MU97 monitor - not an Eizo or a NEC, but still a pretty nice screen and a whole lot more pixels than i had before - a real 4K screen.

Glad you like it. Keep us posted on your experience with it.

Sam

Talking about new monitors, sort of. I just received my new Samsung 50" HD smart TV. I am upgrading from a 27" CRT.

At first I was not impressed with the image quality................after experiencing buyers remorse and wondering if I should just hook my CRT back up I discovered one needs to select an HD channel or it seems the TV tries to display the standard resolution channel and doesn't do a very good job of it..

I be happy now. :-)

Seefutlung

Another Nicely Done. I appreciate the simple yet elegant background replacement layer.

pathfinder

Yes, with TV monitors, the quality of the video signal you send it is very important - we never realized how lousy standard broadcast TV used to be. Funny thing is now HD broadcasting may very well be better than what you are getting from cable - it certainly is here locally where I live.