Mike Boyce
01-18-2008, 05:14 PM
:)Greetings all – this is my first critique.
I captured this image over the holidays while visiting SE Arizona. The Cardinal is on a barrel cactus. The yellow in the image is the fruit of the cactus which the bird had been eating. I removed the fruit debris from the birds beak, some distracting light areas in the background, and a weird black spot on the Cardinal’s tuft. This was quite challenging, as I don’t have Photoshop, and instead have been using an old version (v2.0) of ACD FotoCanvas. Until I recently spoke with a few photographer friends, I never realized why there is so much difference in price between the two pieces of software. Photoshop is now sure to be my next software purchase!
Nikon D200, 200-400 F4 VR lens with NikonTC-1.7E II tele extender (550mm), 1/350s at F8 (lens actually wide open at F4 – should have been listed as F6.8 in metadata with 1.5 stop added for the extender!?) hand held, ISO 250, 10:30am.
Self Critique::o
While this is my best Cardinal photo ever, I am trying to be more artistic in my photo approach and less photojournalistic. This image doesn’t quite meet my desires. Perhaps it should have been framed vertically? And it would have been much nicer with less harsh light… like the sweet light shortly after sunrise.
While looking at the metadata, I noticed that I have been photographing with my D200 set with sharpness set to "hard" and saturation set to "high". I have had difficulty obtaining good detail in both my reds and yellows, and this image is no exception. Can any of you comment on this? What should it be set to, and where and how should I saturate to get a Velvia type saturation look? Would a polarizer be a better way to accomplish this? And finally, would most of you agree that I should quit photographing strictly in jpeg format?
Sorry to be so wordy, but this is the learning forum!
P.S. > The background really turned nasty (as you can see) when i reduced the size of the photo and compressed it with jpeg this time to get below the 146.5Kb size limit. The actual full size image has a smooth background... I suspect that had done previous edits in Tiff (or RAW?) doing this final conversion would have looked much better?
Mike
Learning to do by doing!
I captured this image over the holidays while visiting SE Arizona. The Cardinal is on a barrel cactus. The yellow in the image is the fruit of the cactus which the bird had been eating. I removed the fruit debris from the birds beak, some distracting light areas in the background, and a weird black spot on the Cardinal’s tuft. This was quite challenging, as I don’t have Photoshop, and instead have been using an old version (v2.0) of ACD FotoCanvas. Until I recently spoke with a few photographer friends, I never realized why there is so much difference in price between the two pieces of software. Photoshop is now sure to be my next software purchase!
Nikon D200, 200-400 F4 VR lens with NikonTC-1.7E II tele extender (550mm), 1/350s at F8 (lens actually wide open at F4 – should have been listed as F6.8 in metadata with 1.5 stop added for the extender!?) hand held, ISO 250, 10:30am.
Self Critique::o
While this is my best Cardinal photo ever, I am trying to be more artistic in my photo approach and less photojournalistic. This image doesn’t quite meet my desires. Perhaps it should have been framed vertically? And it would have been much nicer with less harsh light… like the sweet light shortly after sunrise.
While looking at the metadata, I noticed that I have been photographing with my D200 set with sharpness set to "hard" and saturation set to "high". I have had difficulty obtaining good detail in both my reds and yellows, and this image is no exception. Can any of you comment on this? What should it be set to, and where and how should I saturate to get a Velvia type saturation look? Would a polarizer be a better way to accomplish this? And finally, would most of you agree that I should quit photographing strictly in jpeg format?
Sorry to be so wordy, but this is the learning forum!
P.S. > The background really turned nasty (as you can see) when i reduced the size of the photo and compressed it with jpeg this time to get below the 146.5Kb size limit. The actual full size image has a smooth background... I suspect that had done previous edits in Tiff (or RAW?) doing this final conversion would have looked much better?
Mike
Learning to do by doing!