Moderator: Beowulf
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Depth of field, not blur.Bounty wrote:The first is creepy, the second is a mess of blur.
It's still blur.The Grim Squeaker wrote:Depth of field, not blur.
Uh, the foreground is out of the focused DOF, therefore it is blurry. Also, what's the subject? You have multiple competing elements: the backpacker, that big green-yellow fabric and the guy stretching in the distance. They all compete with each other. The foreground is not near indistinct enough to frame the shot (and as Simplicius mentioned, totally irrelevant) and that big field of color doesn't help. The distant-guy isn't located at any of the common framing points, either, which might've marginally helped (rule of thirds, golden ratio, etc.)The Grim Squeaker wrote:Depth of field, not blur.Bounty wrote:The first is creepy, the second is a mess of blur.
It's just peculiarphongn wrote: That engineering-student picture is creepy;
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It's just meant as an amusing piece of life snapshot.the only thing I really like about the running guy is how his shadow is parallel to that blue beam. I get the idea that he's running but nothing else - not the emotion or exertion on this face, nothin'.
. And macro. And learning B/W. 
Ugh, selective desat. If you've got to do it, at least do it with intent. Otherwise it's just another gimmick, and not even the trendiest gimmick.Death wrote:selective desat
The tones specifically of the reflection look all right. Lower contrast than the stuff outside the pool, but even. Must have been bright out, though, because your shadows outside the pool are quite black.Well, the shadows and reflection looked great on the camera screen, less so on the fucked up laptop screen (the tonality went all to hell).
I'd be interested in hearing if it looks worth a damn to anyone here.
It was done with malice and deliberate intentSimplicius wrote:Ugh, selective desat. If you've got to do it, at least do it with intent.Death wrote:selective desat
. (see the blue jeans shot, which makes it work much better I think .)70's gimmicks>HDR gimmickOtherwise it's just another gimmick, and not even the trendiest gimmick.
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What's wrong with Black and white then, eh? (This is the second time I sword to stick to it. So far I broke the rules to take pictures of a cat, a product shoot and the aforementioned colour substitution/removal).Best to get it out of your system early, I suppose.
It looks better on a normal pc screen here in the labs. Still, there's just something...bland about it, and a lot of my BW shots. I upped the contrast and sharpness settings in-camera, but it doesn't seem to change anything.The tones specifically of the reflection look all right. Lower contrast than the stuff outside the pool, but even. Must have been bright out, though, because your shadows outside the pool are quite black.Well, the shadows and reflection looked great on the camera screen, less so on the fucked up laptop screen (the tonality went all to hell).
I'd be interested in hearing if it looks worth a damn to anyone here.
Looking at that one as an advertisement, the motive for using selective desat makes more sense. However, the photo itself would make a incredibly poor advertisement. First of all, although the product is set apart from the rest of the shot by being in color, the color is basically a pastel blue and there is no way that pastel blue on a background of grays is going to leap out and arrest the viewer, where dragging the viewer's eye directly to the product would be the point of such a technique. Secondly, the whole shot is missing the kind of emotion and mood that advertisers use to make people want to buy products - whether glamour, sex appeal, coolness, joy, wealth and fame, or whatever - while this picture is very static, the students standing around don't convey much besides casual friendliness, but a sort of formal friendliness based on their poses.Death wrote:It was done with malice and deliberate intent
All gimmicks are equally repugnant, since they amount to wallpapering over mediocre photographs with cheap flash. Any technique in the hands of someone who uses it with skill and purpose is not necessarily a gimmick, but when Hip Betty takes a photo of her feet and desaturates everything but her shoes, or shoots TRUE HDR CAT, it's just a stupid gimmick.70's gimmicks>HDR gimmick
Nothing wrong with b&w if you can use it well (ditto with color), but I was still talking about selective desturation there.What's wrong with Black and white then, eh? (This is the second time I sword to stick to it. So far I broke the rules to take pictures of a cat, a product shoot and the aforementioned colour substitution/removal).
Well, if your complaint is an aesthetic and not a technical one, then it's easier to explain. It's a bland photo in part because the scene is bland (trees, grass, ho-hum, guy sitting down, kind of hunched, might as well be a rock, ho-hum). It's also a bland photo because the tones are distributed in big chunks of flat tone - the toward the right are one, the shadows are another, the guy and the paving + grass right to the left of him are another, a big chunk of the reflecting pool is another. These chunks of tone are distributed around the photo seemingly at random, so they aren't composed in any way and even work against the composition of the guy and the border of the pool. Since the subject of the photo falls into one of the chunks, with the exception of his head which is highlighted against a shadow (which is good), he basically disappears.It looks better on a normal pc screen here in the labs. Still, there's just something...bland about it, and a lot of my BW shots. I upped the contrast and sharpness settings in-camera, but it doesn't seem to change anything.
I could take colour pictures and desaturate them, but I want to compose and see them in BW in the first place.
I wasn't going for an advertisement look, but thanks for the critique.Simplicius wrote:Looking at that one as an advertisement, the motive for using selective desat makes more senseDeath wrote:It was done with malice and deliberate intent
More technical, I can't explain it, but the reflections looked..stronger.Simplicius wrote:Well, if your complaint is an aesthetic and not a technical one, then it's easier to explain.It looks better on a normal pc screen here in the labs. Still, there's just something...bland about it, and a lot of my BW shots. I upped the contrast and sharpness settings in-camera, but it doesn't seem to change anything.
I could take colour pictures and desaturate them, but I want to compose and see them in BW in the first place.
It's a question of seeing, it's a skill which isn't going to be developed overnight. Which is why NONE of my B&W pictures were taken using the B&W mode on my camera. NONE. All of them were taken in colour, I then visualized what I wanted in the B&W version and used various Photoshop tools to achieve the look I desired. It's not a contrast & sharpness problem, fiddling with those settings on your camera won't help. The problem is visualizing lighting, shades, and colours, and how those colours will render into shades of grey. What will pink look like? Or yellow? Or red & light blue? Colours which seem very contrasty can end up being very close to each other in B&W, and you can't fix that without filters. Which is why I take my pictures in colour and do the conversion in Photoshop, this way I can see & control everything and add in various filter effects as needed as I've done with this picture.The Grim Squeaker wrote:It looks better on a normal pc screen here in the labs. Still, there's just something...bland about it, and a lot of my BW shots. I upped the contrast and sharpness settings in-camera, but it doesn't seem to change anything.
I could take colour pictures and desaturate them, but I want to compose and see them in BW in the first place.
The problem is that I don't know (yet) how to think or visualize in black and white. Doing so in colour just means that I work for a good colour picture, not a good convertable BW picture.J wrote:It's a question of seeing, it's a skill which isn't going to be developed overnight. Which is why NONE of my B&W pictures were taken using the B&W mode on my camera. NONE. All of them were taken in colour, I then visualized what I wanted in the B&W version and used various Photoshop tools to achieve the look I desired. It's not a contrast & sharpness problem, fiddling with those settings on your camera won't help. The problem is visualizing lighting, shades, and colours, and how those colours will render into shades of grey. What will pink look like? Or yellow? Or red & light blue? Colours which seem very contrasty can end up being very close to each other in B&W, and you can't fix that without filters. Which is why I take my pictures in colour and do the conversion in Photoshop, this way I can see & control everything and add in various filter effects as needed as I've done with this picture.The Grim Squeaker wrote:It looks better on a normal pc screen here in the labs. Still, there's just something...bland about it, and a lot of my BW shots. I upped the contrast and sharpness settings in-camera, but it doesn't seem to change anything.
I could take colour pictures and desaturate them, but I want to compose and see them in BW in the first place.
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Don't care; it is an experiment with exposure times, and a successful one.The Grim Squeaker wrote:Simplicus - the first one is weak, though the idea has merit.
So you see a photo of a lit factory and your conclusion isn't that it is a photo of the factory? Crazy.Second shot has nice lights, but it's unclear what's in them apart from a factory (and that's cut in half).
"Moonlike" - it is the moon; there's nothing else lighting the shot. The glowing bits are the moonlight reflecting off the edges of the rock, a twig, and a leaf. Taken early evening, probably around 5 PM or so after the sun was completely set.Third shot has some beautiful moonlike light. What are the fire like glowing things on the bottom of the frame? Did you take it at night or early in the morning?
What actually makes the image work for me is that it's not all about the guy in the centre; it's very busy in the periphery with the overlapping light/shadow circles while he's standing there in the middle looking serene. Especially for an image that was, I presume, taken in difficult circumstances (I mean, it's not like you have infinite options for framing and timing during a concert), it looks really distinctive and conveys a mood.Sting one not as much; the shadow on the stage really is awesome but the rest doesn't do much for me.
