Team-BHP - The Official non-auto Image thread

Ok. I wanted to see if you were able to get the full height of the tower from that angle.
@Samurai San. Sorry about the mixup. There are so many pics in this thread that am losing track. and i guess you are just too humble about your PP skills. Your pics are really good and i remember reading in some thread that you use a P&S with a unremovable l.r.zoom . Thats quite a bunch of good pics you have.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Venkatesh.C (Post 576430)

and i guess you are just too humble about your PP skills. Your pics are really good and i remember reading in some thread that you use a P&S with a unremovable l.r.zoom . Thats quite a bunch of good pics you have.

Thanks Ventatesh, but I have switched to dSLR since March 2006. BTW, I am not being humble about my PP skills. I never spend more than 5 minutes on post-processing any raw image, I don't know any more than that. Therefore I focus more on composition, I try to get that right.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samurai (Post 576178)

If you are shooting digital, you really have no choice. I know people who think PP as cheating, but that is basically ignorance.

I was one of those guys. Later I realized that when you are using a digital camera, the camera is actually processing the date it captures from sensor and converting it into a digital image (AWB, Exposure compensation etc). Since the camera has limited processing power, your pictures are not always good. So the best way to go is to take a RAW image and use your computers processing power to replicate what you actually saw.

Everytime I take a picture, I use PS to adjust the curves, levels and crop the image. Anything beyond that is still not acceptable to me.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mayavi (Post 576744)

Nothing to do with processing power here. Its just that JPEG is lossy and you lose a lot of information since its 8-bit/channel.
When you do an in camera JPG conversion, you are limited to a particular setting. If you use your PC to convert a RAW using the same settings you will get a similar image.
There are exceptions though. For example the Pentax *ist DS image processor is not good. So in camera RAW can give you much better pictures in PP than the in camera JPEG.

Coming to RAW files you tend to gain an additional stop in shadows and 1.5-2 stop information in highlights. that way the RAW file has more information and if your shot is underexposed by a small-medium margin, you can recover that info later.
When you are in JPEG, the file is 8-bit/channel, and you lose the additional information. That way you lose a lot of control.

Here is a good example of what RAW+PP can achieve over just Camera JPG.

This is what the camera saw and shot in RAW mode.

Same image after few minutes of PP in Photoshop.

See how it uncovered tones that were invisible in the first shot? The first one looks rubbish, where as the second one shows tile roofed homes on a mountain slope on a misty morning.

Here is a 'Loud Thought'.
I have been shooting with a Film based SLR(Nikon-F70) since 97 (when i started learning proper Photography from a semi pro) I dont know how they do it in proper Photography schools, here is how i learnt it
MY first subjects were inanimate objects. Statues, mundane objects like flower vases, cups, then moved on to night-scapes and night traffic
I mostly used to practice in night time shooting as they used to be the most challenging ones. It took me a lot of time and i used to spend 10 minutes mentally picturing the composition and figuring out hte right spot to read the light from and how to average the readings
I used to bracket mostly in the range of 2 stops + or -. It was very expensive and 5 out of 10 times all the three pics (bracketed) will turn out quite interestingly. But over a period of time the accuracy started getting better. To avoid PP, I befriended the development lab guy and told him not to do any PP on my films.
Now I have switched to a digital SLR(Nikon D50) (thanks to my new born who is still my most challenging subject ever. ) .
Nowadays my photography skills have deteriorated because i realised that i don't have to think much about exposure as i can always correct it later.
I have started developing my PS skills.

Slowly i have realised that i have become quite careless about exposure.

Is it just me or does it happen to everyone?
If it happens for everyone, then is it not bad for the skill?
I remember a similar debate i had with my guru who used to say that the then modern Film SLRs which had multi-segment metering and auto exposure suggestion
were killing the art because in his days of FM10 and FM2 one had to cultivate the art of deducing the correct exposure setting from experience.

The big problem in photography is capturing the tonal range our eyes can see.
Some high-end sensors can record more tonal information but still can’t record all the tonal variations the eye can see. This is where post processing is a blessing.

You can process RAW file in two or more different ways and combine these images using a lot of post processing and Image editing software available in the market today.
(Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture, Light Crafts, Lightzone, Etc and not to forget the manufacturer provided software with the camera.

Samurai has done a great job explaining this with his capture.

Post processing really helps our picture more closely resemble to what our eye could see instead of what the camera can record.
It gives us the possibilities for capturing reality in a way that was never before possible.

Cheers
Hellcat

Venkatesh, it happened to lots of people while switching from film to digital. I only used film SLR from 1989 to 2001. Then I bought a digital P&S (dSLR was too too expensive then) for taking quick shots of my son. The ease of use won and I stopped using the bulky film SLR. It took a few years of that to realise that the quality of my photos had taken a nose dive after switching to digital. Couple of years back I decided to get back in seriously, later I switched to a dSLR, bought CS2 and now I can say I am composing better than my film SLR days.

Regarding loss of exposure art, it happens with change in technology. But you still have control over exposure. Nothing wrong in letting the camera do the metering, you can still decide the right exposure using exposure compensation.

@shazikon, great pics. Do some PP man. There are some compositions that can be corrected to make these stunners. do some cropping(pic 2 and 3) and background blurring(to blur the non paddy subjects even more) (pic 1).

Pic 1 has a dried up sheath in the middle. Was that intentionally so? or did it just happen?

great subjects man. where is this location exactly?