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GAF Photography 2007 - Q4

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Happy 4th Q guys. Hopefully I'll have a bit more time in the up and coming (gloriously beautiful) fall months. Damn being overworked like crazy lately. Too much going on, not enough snap time!
 
I heart lake Grapevine

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Downtown Dallas at the AAC...boobies!
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I may have a crappo camera, but man if it wasnt fun to shoot anyways :)
 
hey_monkey said:
Aaaand here are (some of) my reshoots. Please feel free to criticize the hell out of them... I want to avoid the snapshotish thing. :(

1. I did process this one -- original was a bit dark. Just a little work with levels and curves. The rest are completely untouched.
[]http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2125/1525492364_64ded8295b.jpg[/IMG]

2
[]http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2073/1525528096_c8a38afcfa.jpg[/IMG]

3
[]http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2120/1525537922_16bcd14d82.jpg[/IMG]

4
[]http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2315/1525509274_6ae9806ac4.jpg[/IMG]

5
[]http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2327/1525543790_4977acaad6.jpg[/IMG]

and another of the creepy statues, just because. yes, the hoods are part of them, as is the "rope" around them:

[]http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2330/1524636117_675626fb59.jpg[/IMG]
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Ignoring my own personal bias for high contrast+lots of bokeh, I'd say the main issue I have is that it's difficult to see what the focus of the pictures are. 3,4, & 5 are good (4 is my favorite; the way the tree frames the pillar is cool) but 1 and particularly 2 are somewhat bland and snap-shot-ish since everything is there and nothing is drawing the eyes. And in 1, the gravestone on the left is fighting for attention with everything else, but it's cut off at the top.

anyway:

New pictures, including an assignment reject. plus, some really noticeable inconsistencies with Adobe Camera Raw post-processing! yay!

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and this was going to be for assignment 24, but I don't like it so much:
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Yep I did some PP work in Photoshop to get rid of skin marks and bumps and what not. The models are pretty young so there faces and skin are already pretty smooth and clean.

I was going for a more of a pro model retouch, in the same style as a magazine cover.

There is some colour balancing and shadow recovery done also, plus a tad of sharpening.

Here is a fast gif I made. I hope the compression isn't too bad.

Touch-animate.gif
 
I returned to the Coromandel as a sort of, well, nevermind - here are some pics:

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All taken with 40D, efs17-55IS, and a circular polariser.
 
mrkgoo: I love the image of the person looking out from the cave, it's perfect. Also a big fan of the cow skulls!

I've been out of these threads for too long! I finally got back out with my camera (thanks to the latest assignment and here're some of the "rejects", though I was still happy with them all!

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LunaClover said:
I heart lake Grapevine

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f155/marein/Oct 9 lake and AAC/P1010113.jpg
http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f155/marein/Oct 9 lake and AAC/P1010158.jpg
http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f155/marein/Oct 9 lake and AAC/P1010151.jpg
http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f155/marein/Oct 9 lake and AAC/P1010147.jpg

Downtown Dallas at the AAC...boobies!
P1010175.jpg

P1010188.jpg


I may have a crappo camera, but man if it wasnt fun to shoot anyways :)
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Where are the bush statues at the AAC? Those look cool, I might have to check them out.
 
samusx said:
Yep I did some PP work in Photoshop to get rid of skin marks and bumps and what not. The models are pretty young so there faces and skin are already pretty smooth and clean.

I was going for a more of a pro model retouch, in the same style as a magazine cover.

There is some colour balancing and shadow recovery done also, plus a tad of sharpening.
Click to expand...
What kind of technique are you using to retouch the faces? Like Jax had said, they look a bit plasticy. Are you airbrushing with skintones? Clone brush? heal brush? I find that retouching on a separate layer helps. Also the fade command.
 
Well I am using some cloning and airbrushing as well as some blur masking. Yes I do work on a seperate layer, and use the fade command regularly.

The very soft look is something that I was going for. It's like I said before, sort of a magazine cover style. Ultra perfect and clean. I feel that the eyes need a bit of work. They don't draw you in like I would like.
 
xpwpqa.jpg


Just a quick snippet I took of a particular plant whilst in my car on a drizzly day. Only took 3 shots, this was the best of the 3 with no photoshop. Guessing that the rain droplets on my windshield created the blur experience around the actual focus point of the plant.
 
mrkgoo: I love the image of the person looking out from the cave, it's perfect. Also a big fan of the cow skulls!
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mrkgoo with the awesome pics again! So vivid and clean <3
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Wout said:
mrkgoo: Beautiful shots! Where is that exactly?
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Thanks for the kind comments! They're taken at the Coromandel Peninsula, at the East coast of the North Island in New Zealand.

Aidan, GKB, Yonn, Warm machine, guess: Loving all your images on this page. (sorry for being so brief).
 
A few pics from out and around the south bank in London.

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I have some issues i hope you guys can help with though. I can't seem to get the exposure right, and the photos i take never seem crisp enough unless i do macro shooting. Can i get some basic nooby tips on how to get the best out of my camera (Canon Ixus 70)?
 
arena08 said:
A few pics from out and around the south bank in London.
1571567457_fa37582a75_o.jpg
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That picture would have been perfect for the photo assignment.

I have some issues i hope you guys can help with though. I can't seem to get the exposure right, and the photos i take never seem crisp enough unless i do macro shooting. Can i get some basic nooby tips on how to get the best out of my camera (Canon Ixus 70)?
Click to expand...

I'm no expert, but I also have an Ixus(Digital Elph here), and have problems getting the right exposure. If I'm taking a picture in low light, they just don't come out well unless I have a tripod.

If you are shooting and the back lighting is very bright, you could go into manual mode and lower the exposure to closer to (-2).

Or sometimes I just focus on another object that is the same distance away as what I actually want to shot. I guess these two pictures are extreme cases, taken in auto mode, but one is focused on the table, with the open windows in view. The bottom pic is focused on the wall, same distance as the table, with the window completely out of view. I guess the amount of lighting somewhere in the middle of the two cases would make a good picture.
test1.jpg


test2.jpg
 
mrkgoo: right back atcha. Really lovely colours. And you know I have a soft spot for silhouettes.

Nice to see some shots of the south bank, I'll be heading there on the 22nd for Video Games Live. :D
 
aidan said:
Perfect. Abso-fuckin-lutely perfect.
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I dont want to spoil your appreciation of the photo, but i really really wish they would have cleaned the pods on the eye so i could actually get a nice picture.
 
Great King Bowser said:
mrkgoo: right back atcha. Really lovely colours. And you know I have a soft spot for silhouettes.

Nice to see some shots of the south bank, I'll be heading there on the 22nd for Video Games Live. :D
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I'll be there too! im actually studying games design at south bank uni :D
 
Was kind of pissed that I got a really bad cold on the weekend where I promised myself I would go out and snap some scenic shots. I ended up walking around my place and taking some shots and I like how some of them came out...

Clock_Blur.jpg

Led_Light.jpg

Living_Room_Blinds.jpg

Pumpkin_Mist.jpg


I didn't really care about any of the settings, white balance and crap (I guess its kinda indicative of the mood I'm in :lol). But I like how those 4 came out. THe pumpkin one was one of many, I was trying to get the twist when I hit the shutter to flow as natural and flowing as possible.

The color in the room was a probably due to the Big Screen TV being on and it being twilight outside. I love it.
 
arena08 said:
I'll be there too! im actually studying games design at south bank uni :D
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Ah awesome. I was thinking about bringing my camera gear for the pre-show hi-jinx but don't want to if I'll have to check my bags during the show. Any ideas what the dealio is?
 
Good stuff, everyone. This quarter is off to a great start!

Jugendstil, love the colors! BTW, we need to get a GAF photographers Halo 3 game going! :D
 
From my recent lecture tour:

Frankfurt/Main central station:
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Nice reflection (taken on sunday, so not eligible for the assignment thread, unfortunately):
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Shitty hotel:
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Room wiz a view!
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Workplaces:
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arena08 said:
I have some issues i hope you guys can help with though. I can't seem to get the exposure right, and the photos i take never seem crisp enough unless i do macro shooting. Can i get some basic nooby tips on how to get the best out of my camera (Canon Ixus 70)?
Click to expand...
Yeah, I actually mentioned this in a big primer I wrote up for another friend recently. It has to do with how your camera's lightmeter works, and the implications that has for relying on it to auto-expose:
To expose a scene manually, you need to look at your light meter. Your
camera almost certainly has one, even if you don't notice it. It
usually looks like this:
-2||||||||||-1||||||||||0||||||||||+1|||||||||||+2
and somewhere along it will be a marker or arrow, or if you're way off
it might be pointing off to one of the sides. 0 is balanced so that if
you took the image and averaged the whole thing in greyscale you'd get
18% gray. Pictures you take on auto are taken at the 0 mark. I don't
know how or why, but, in general, most scenes are properly exposed at
18% gray - it just works that way. The numbers refer to stops - a stop
is sort of a measurement of the amount of light you're letting in. If
you're at zero, which is to say properly exposed, and you dial the
shutter speed slower, you'll let in more light and the arrow will move
right to show you that you're increasing the exposure. Likewise, if
you close the lens more (move to, say, f/8 from f/4), the marker will
move to the left to show you that you're underexposing.

The important thing to keep in mind here is that your camera always
meters for 18% gray, even though some scenes obviously shouldn't be.
If I take a picture of a snowman on a sunny day, the autoexposure will
make my image too dark. This sounds counterintuitive, but think about
it - the camera wants to get 18% gray out of a scene that's almost
certainly far brighter than that (most everything in it is white
snow), so the "proper" exposure winds up underexposing the image. To
compensate, you'd need to overexpose from the metered reading to get
the correct brightness. This is just how your lightmeter works.

Another situation in which your lightmeter can mislead you is when you
want to properly expose a certain part of a scene despite brighter or
darker surroundings. For example, if I'm taking a picture from my room
looking on my window at noon, the scene outside will be much brighter
than the scene inside. If I want to expose for the outside, I'll need
to decrease the amount of light let in, and if I want to expose for
the inside, I'll need to increase the amount of light let in. The "0"
reading on the lightmeter will likely give me both an underexposed
inside and an overexposed outside, since it's reading the whole scene.
(Cameras can only capture maybe six stops of light, not nearly as much
as our eyes.) Some cameras have lightmeters that can function in
another mode, called spot metering, which reads only for a certain
part of the frame, in which case the reading will be whatever properly
exposes only precisely what you're centered on. There are of course
other methods, like weighted metering, but those are imprecise for our
purposes. The rule of thumb for these things is to overexpose two
stops for shadow detail (the inside) and underexpose two stops for
highlight detail (the outside).
Click to expand...
You'll usually find this in the menu somewhere on a pocket camera - look for something like "exposure bias" or anything mentioning "+1EV" or "-2EV" or similar (EV = exposure value), and use your own common sense to adjust for your lightmeter's weaknesses. And while that rule of thumb came in very handy in my film photo class, the great thing about digital is that you can bracket (shoot successive, slightly different exposure) easily or simply check on the histogram right after you take the shot to make sure it's properly exposed.

AirBrian said:
Jugendstil, love the colors! BTW, we need to get a GAF photographers Halo 3 game going! :D
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Yeah! You and I are XBL friends as of a week or so ago, and I played with Kuran once during the beta, but I know there are more of us!
 
thatbox said:
Yeah, I actually mentioned this in a big primer I wrote up for another friend recently. It has to do with how your camera's lightmeter works, and the implications that has for relying on it to auto-expose:

You'll usually find this in the menu somewhere on a pocket camera - look for something like "exposure bias" or anything mentioning "+1EV" or "-2EV" or similar (EV = exposure value), and use your own common sense to adjust for your lightmeter's weaknesses. And while that rule of thumb came in very handy in my film photo class, the great thing about digital is that you can bracket (shoot successive, slightly different exposure) easily or simply check on the histogram right after you take the shot to make sure it's properly exposed.


Yeah! You and I are XBL friends as of a week or so ago, and I played with Kuran once during the beta, but I know there are more of us!
Click to expand...
thanks; your write up was very helpful, it explained alot =D
 
Thanks for the advice on lighting! :)

I just took this a few minutes ago, poking my head out of my flat window. The blue is the london eye and the yellow is street lights.

1607432705_5e344b9059_o.jpg
 
LuCkymoON said:
thanks; your write up was very helpful, it explained alot =D
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Glad to help! If you can't find any exposure controls, not even the exposure compensation options, a simple trick is to move until only the section you want to expose for is in the frame, then depress the shutter halfway to force the autoexposure to meter for it, and then to recompose your shot without letting off the shutter so it doesn't adjust itself for the new framing. This can be tricky if it autofocuses and meters at the same time, but just play with it to see what you can accomplish.
 
I just color corrected a little. I was listening to the Pixies song Havalina while working on the photo in Photoshop, and it was just perfect when I moved the red tones a little to the right. Went right along with the music.

I used a Canon film camera (newer model, don't know exact number) and a 17-40mm L lens.
 
Futureman said:
I just color corrected a little. I was listening to the Pixies song Havalina while working on the photo in Photoshop, and it was just perfect when I moved the red tones a little to the right. Went right along with the music.

I used a Canon film camera (newer model, don't know exact number) and a 17-40mm L lens.
Click to expand...

It turned out really well like that... just gorgeous.
 
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