Gary's last-minute shadows

muddyknees

Ran across some "shadow-op's" today, now I'm trying to choose ...


Rushadows on Duckweed

should I clone out the flare or is that an interesting feature? Is this sort of cloning legal for this contest?


Treeshadows on Duckweed

I could lighten up the foreground grasses, but would that distract? I want to burn in the yellowish highlights in foreground, I assume that would be legal?







Intercepting Sunlight



Photographing photopanel photo-interception

on these last two, I distort-transformed the image to align the panel edges that I had not aligned when I took the photo. (This technique can also be used to level horizons or correct perspective distortion.) But is this much photochopping acceptable for this contest?


Unfortunately I had my ISO set at 800 because I had been photographing mushrooms & mosses most of the morning - hence the blown-out hands, but that effect seems to "work" here in suggesting sunlight being intercepted (or am I just not facing the truth that I just blew a good photo-op?)

-Gary

wxwax

Cloning is Ok for this one. The colors in the swamp shots are amazing.

muddyknees

wxwax wrote:

Cloning is Ok for this one. The colors in the swamp shots are amazing.

OK, here's a preliminary clonning attempt. Hope to work on it some more later. The colors are just a tad warmer and oversaturated than reality, but I like this effect here. (Much of the saturation I attribute to the ISO 800 I stupidly left my camera on - this pond was an opening in dark woods and I was with a group of people and wasn't paying attention.)





Thanks for commenting, Sid.

Regrding your shot from 12/4, I'm wondering whether cropping out some of the curb at the bottom would help bring out more the alternating pattern of shadow and light on the sidewalk.

Gary

gus

I liked the colours also...very green. Nice catch. Wonder how many cotton mouths are in there.

muddyknees

Humungus wrote:

I liked the colours also...very green. Nice catch. Wonder how many cotton mouths are in there.

We actually expected to see some western pond turtles, and I suppose we might have looked for any of these:
//http://www.sonoma.edu/org/preserve/species_lists/herps_at_fop.pdf

We did find a lot of mushrooms: //http://muddyknees.smugmug.com/Nature/49728


Gary

wxwax

Muddy, know whatcha mean about forgetting to check the ISO setting. It's my almost daily reminder that I don't really know what I'm doing.

I like the shot. Couple of thoughts:the dark parts seem to be pitch black, which kinda robs the photo of something. And while I like the shot, I'm not sure how big a story the shadows tell. For me, the shot's all about the colors. JMHO, of course.

muddyknees

wxwax wrote:

Muddy, know whatcha mean about forgetting to check the ISO setting. It's my almost daily reminder that I don't really know what I'm doing.

I like the shot. Couple of thoughts:the dark parts seem to be pitch black, which kinda robs the photo of something. And while I like the shot, I'm not sure how big a story the shadows tell. For me, the shot's all about the colors. JMHO, of course.

Thanks for these useful comments.

Well, I thought the shadow was kinda neat too, but then I was on a shadow quest for some odd reason...

My Raw file actually has plenty of detail in those deep shadows, but I did some major adjustments in Camera-Raw to reduce the overall exposure to bring out the duckweed colors and subordinate the cattail thicket detail that I thought had pukey colors and a chaotic texture.

So I thought I'd just try your suggestion via a shadow/highlight adjustment but ran into a problem in my working psd because I did my cloning touchups on a separate layer etc. and can't seem to apply the adjustment to all the layers at once even if I set up a layer set. But I think I'll start a thread in the "Shenanigans" section to discuss this.

I had thought of bringing out more deep-shadow detail in the 2nd pond shot the "tree-shadows" one, maybe I'll try that now... naw - also rather ugly looking weeds IMO. unfortunately.

Yes, I've been s l o w l y learning from my mistakes: First, a long time ago now, I routinely put my camera on a monopod to eliminate camera shake, then, I started using shutter-priority with a slow shutter speed to take advantage of my steadier camera and get better depth of field for my closeups whenever possible. Then just recently I began changing my ISO to get those mushrooms tucked away in the deep shadows and still keep up with the group (no time to set up a tripod). But I'm still working out the subtleties of that change I guess. My next major change will be to start using the auto-exposure bracketing feature routinely, to have fewer blown highlights than I've been getting, and maybe extend what can be done via multiple exposure-renditions of a simgle Raw file.


Gary

wxwax

I can spend hours trying to merge different exposures and masking them.

muddyknees

wxwax wrote:

I can spend hours trying to merge different exposures and masking them.

...which only makes it worth doing if the raw material is near perfect already. Makes me want to go back to the good ole days when I couldn't afford that much film so would just skip the problem-shots and be more careful exposing the ones I went for. And if the lab result wasn't satisfactory, well, forget it.

'Course I also remember wasting a lot of time in the darkroom trying to "save" some hopeless B&W negs back in high school.

Gary