Lake McGregor NZ

[Glennie Passier]

First time posting in this forum. This is Lake McGregor in the MacKenzie Basin of New Zealand's South Island.

It was interesting to see that when "saving for the web" the image quality only got to 67% to reach the maximum 400kb. I hope it looks OK.

Canon 5D2
Canon 24-70mm @ 24mm
1/20 sec @ f/22
ISO 160
Tripod

C&C Always appreciated and welcomed!

[Don Railton]

Hi Glennie,

You are tugging at my heart strings here a bit as an ex Kiwi... Love the colours , mountain BG and the reflections in the lake, nice lead too. Maybe I would have kept all the tree reflection that's in the water though and made the tree a little less dominant.... I also think the IQ might have suffered slightly by your posting technique, might be wrong here however. I resize by 'Save for web', ensure sRGB & embed profile are 'ticked' and then put in the pixel dims I want (1200 x 800). I then go to what looks like a stack of paper top RHS side of the screen and choose "optimise to file size" and choose 395 KB. (resizing isn't exact and you want a bit of wiggle room to stay under 400KB) then save the image to post..

regards

DON

[Glennie Passier]

Thank you Don. NZ is such a beautiful place. I don't know why you Kiwis leave in droves to a desert island. (Don't get me wrong, I'm as true blue as they come!)

I was a bit torn with the reflection. I have other images. Too much tree, not enough tree.

I was surprised at the percentage of 67%. I follow the directions, as you have mentioned, all except the last bit "what looks like a stack of paper top RHS side of the screen and choose "optimise to file size" and choose 395KB I've never done that before. I have just posted in the ETL and the image size came in at 398KB. I don't know what went wrong with this landscape shot. But that's a very handy tip. Thank you!

[Diane Miller]

Agree on wanting all the tree reflection, but a beautiful scene well rendered. There is an odd look to the fine tree limbs -- how does the raw file look at 100%?

Where did you focus? I would have focused on the tree, but f/22 can give softening from diffraction and that might be what happened to the limbs. Different lenses have different quirks and you may have been caught by one of them. It's possible the JPEG creation is at fault, but I doubt it. So one at full quality and compare on your computer at 100%.

[Glennie Passier]

Diane, you are a hard act to follow! Congratulations again on a most outstanding image of the Horse Tail Falls.

I focused on one of the lower limbs of the tree. The finer twigs on the ends of the branches are a red/purple colour, so that might have clashed against the blue sky? I looked at the image at 100% and the twigs look good and sharp.

I did a bit of horizon leveling and that's where the bottom of the tree reflection went! One day....

[Don Lacy]

Welcome to the forum Glennie, Agree with the others on the reflection and I would also would have preferred the tree was not as dominate in the frame. You do have a nice leading line in the bank and the white mountain peaks pull the viewers eye the rest of the way through the frame. I do have two or three suggestions first I would have liked this to have been taken in better light with warmer tones also would have loved to have some clouds in the sky I know its not something we can control but I will return to a location again and again untill I get the right conditions. Also there was no need to shoot this at f/22 at 24 mm you would have had enough DOF at f/10 or f/13 to get everything in focus as Diane pointed out at f/22 you are losing sharpness to diffraction so I would avoid it unless there is a photographic reason to be there.

[Adhika Lie]

Welcome to the forum, Glennie. I agree with wanting a little bit more of the reflection or maybe even crop most of it. I could see this with 1/4~1/3 of the bottom gone and that would introduce some sort of panoramic feel to it. New Zealand is such a beautiful place. I would like to visit one day!

[Andrew McLachlan]

Welcome to Landscapes Glennie...some good suggestions already given above and I agree with Don on better light. If this location is easily accessible for you, you may want to try photographing it at sunrise or sunset and if shot from a lower perspective it may have even more impact. The tree has such a great shape to it as it leans out over the pond. Looking forward to more of your landscape imagery :)