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Morning

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 3:28 am
by Winston
I usually get up before sunrise. Sometimes I get it right so that when I go out to get the papers from the side walk, pick them up and turn around, I see this:

Image
A700: 3s f/8.0 at 11.0mm iso200

What do you see in the morning?

Re: Morning

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 7:08 am
by Tony Meredith
This is from a few years ago, and heaven forbid, taken on my old Nikon. Unfortunately i had to get to work so i only had time for a few quick shots.
DSCN6348.JPG.jpg
DSCN6348.JPG.jpg (115.64 KiB) Viewed 11392 times
jpeg straight from camera.

Tony

Re: Morning

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 8:20 am
by aster
Winston, what a wonderful evenly distrubuted exposure! Light seems to be coming from all directions and there are no dark shadows... :) Impressive.

Thanks for waking up and deciding to pick the newspaper.



Tony, those are indeed blazing skies. What a way to start the day!

Thanks,
Yildiz

Re: Morning

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 10:01 am
by bossel
Nice pic, Winston. I wonder did you use DRO or HRD? And 3s exposure means you take your tripod when going to pick up the newspaper? :lol:

Re: Morning

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 11:38 am
by aster
Winston;

I forgot to mention that you live in a beautiful place and among some wonderful trees and nature in general in my first message. The log house is also lovely and cozy and looks neat in this technic you shot the photo.

There, now I feel better for saying all that as well! :D

Yildiz

Re: Morning

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 1:32 pm
by Dr. Harout
bossel wrote:Nice pic, Winston. I wonder did you use DRO or HRD? And 3s exposure means you take your tripod when going to pick up the newspaper? :lol:
I think Winston put the camera on an existing thing, such as fence, or pole or mailbox...
Excellent shot.

Re: Morning

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 7:18 pm
by bonneville
What a great idea, and you do have a great morning view Winston.

I live in one of the few rural parts of the UK and when I look out in the morning I see my trees. But it depends on the time of year that presents me with its mood.

This is early morning winter:
Image

and this is rainy summer:
Image

(BTW, I've check on the path outside my cottage but there is never a newspaper there :lol: )

Brian

Re: Morning

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 7:56 pm
by Winston
Nice images, Brian. Ooooh so many variables without touching the camera; time of day, time of year, type of weather...

Re: Morning

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 8:08 pm
by Winston
First things first: Thanks to all for your generous comments.

Doc: My existing thing is a tripod.

Bossel: I usually don't take my camera either.

Yildiz: Assuming you mean illumination, the evenly distributed exposure was achieved with five applications of Lightroom’s adjustment brush.

All: The image presented is probably not what I saw. It is an attempt to create an image representing some mixture of what I wanted to see and what I remembered seeing out of what the camera saw.

I frequently see something like this in the morning and always say to myself: "I ought to record that." This particular morning, I decided to do just that.

So I went back in the house, went out to the garage, got the tripod out of the truck, took it out of it’s sleeve, removed the ball-head cover, found the pano-head and mounted it on the ball head, changed lenses on the camera body . . . well, you get the idea . . . it took a considerable amount of time. Then I took the rig outside, setup the tripod after spending some more time considering the shot height and placement (I picked a low one), leveled the pano head and composed the image in the viewfinder (yes, live view would have been helpful).

By then, enough time had elapsed that the scene was totally different from what I had first seen. But, since it looked like all of the visual elements, though altered, were still there, I proceeded.

I turned on the two-second MLU and made an exposure. I checked the image for proper exposure and went back inside. Here is the raw-file’s embedded jpeg. It looks nothing like the final image.

If I had been shooting jpegs, game over. The final image is not possible with a jpeg. My objective in making the exposure was not to get a good-looking camera image but to stuff as much information as possible into a raw file so that I could extract what I needed in PP.

All post processing was done with Lightroom 2.4. After a lot of adjustment sliding and application of a soft-light tone curve and the adjustment brush, the final image emerged.

This is why I always use raw (cRaw).

If you stuck with me, thanks for wading through this.

Re: Morning

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 8:25 pm
by aster
This is a very 'illuminating', tutorial-like explanation Winston. The final image is indeed something other-worldly...a world with 5 suns rising almost at the same time... :D

I enjoyed it.

Thank you.

Yildiz

Re: Morning

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 8:34 pm
by bossel
Wow that's some cool post-processing - well done! (btw, how long did it take you?)

Re: Morning

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 9:19 pm
by Winston
aster wrote:This is a very 'illuminating', tutorial-like explanation Winston. The final image is indeed something other-worldly...a world with 5 suns rising almost at the same time... :D

I enjoyed it.

Thank you.

Yildiz
Yildiz, think of them as flashlights...much more manageable :)
bossel wrote:Wow that's some cool post-processing - well done! (btw, how long did it take you?)
Most images not long at all. Challenging ones like this take me a lot more clock time than actual time.

This is because I do it in spurts. It's easy for me to get lost in my own edits. So I do a rough try at an idea and snap-shot it and similarly try a few more and then give it a rest. When I come back, I can usually see what I like or don't like about each version and get it done. It iterated this process a couple of times for this one.

Clock time . . . hours. Computer time . . . minutes.

Re: Morning

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 11:20 pm
by KevinBarrett
Beautiful shot, Winston! Way to set the bar high on this thread.

It just happens that my wife picked me up from work this morning and as we drove home I was able to snap a few pictures in the morning light...maybe this thread will still be active by the time I get to them.

Re: Morning

Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2009 4:38 am
by aster
I like the illusion of thinking your world has 5 wonderful suns bending to your will! :D

That's part of photography; either one creates / builds one's own illusion of what it should be like in the same realm as of a painter or live with the reality of a snapshot.

If anything, those flashlights should be enourmous in size to light this land piece anyway...if this photo was an exact copy of a reality.. :D

Yildiz

Re: Morning

Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2009 1:58 pm
by aster
Woke up to see this at 5 am this morning.

Image