Barbwire Meets Feather

[Mike Fuhr]

I had a chance to get out today -- this one was my favorite. Found a neat old rusty woven fence that has been there for years. Very interesting shapes and designs. Slight crop and sharpness added.

D50
100-300mm
210mm
1/800
F/10 (-1.0)
ISO 200

[Mike Moats]

Hey Mike, very cool comp, nice textures and BG.Well done.

[Julie Kenward]

Mike, I do like this image - nice play against the barbed wire and the feather in textures. I did want to mention one thing, though.

Your last couple of images have felt "dark" when I've viewed them and have been on the dark end of the histogram when I looked at them in Photoshop...barely any data is getting into the middle and upper ends of that histogram. You might want to read up about "exposing to the right" and what it means to your images when almost all the data is in the left end. I know there's some stuff in the educational resources forum here at BPN and a ton of stuff online. Let me know if you need help finding it.

Basically what it means is that the right side (lighter and midtones) data on a histogram carries more weight for giving your images fine details. Of course, if the subject is a dark one the data should be more to the left side but your images feel even darker than they need to be and I bet you're losing some of the fine detail you could be capturing if you opened up your exposure a bit more. I'd encourage you to play around with bumping up that exposure a stop or two so you're capturing all the detail and data that you can. You can always pull it back a bit in processing if you feel it's too light - but at least the data will be there.

[Mike Fuhr]

Thanks Jules -- I've really had a difficult time since I got this new monitor. I have been exposing and editing my photos based on how it will look on this monitor, but when I check them out on a different monitor I'm amazed at how dark they look. I also get worried about certain bright areas getting blown out which makes me darken them a bit. I'm going to go look into this more.

[Mike Fuhr]

Yikes -- that IS dark. I cannot beleive the difference rfom onw monitor to another. So frustrating because it looked great on my Apple monitor...

[Bob Allen]

Looks great on my Apple Cinema Display as well. Pulling it up in Photoshop CS4, it does skew to the left. It has some pixels that trail off to the right, certainly caused by the feather shaft and glints on the barbed wire. I tried to pull in the right edge but that immediately blows out the highlights. On my monitor (and Mike's), it is properly exposed. These differences happen.

Mike, to approximate what Windows users are seeing, pull up your image in Photoshop. Then Edit > Convert to Profile > sRGB (if not done already). Then View > Proof Setup > Windows RGB. You'll see the entire image darken.


Almost forgot to add that even though I don't shoot images that contain man-made objects, I am really drawn to this image. It's lovely and has a rustic "nature meets the west" feel to it. Yihaa, partner!