Owl's Head over Black Pond

[bikehikeskifish]

For your enjoyment here are two photos of Owl's Head over Black Pond. Nice snow accents, but the pond was not yet frozen and so there were nice reflections. This was taken at 7:15am 11/17/2007, so about 40 minutes after sunrise.

BIGEarl enjoying the view that has escaped him thus far:

Make:
    Canon
Model:
    Canon PowerShot A570 IS
F stop:
    F/2.8
Exposure:
    1/125 sec.
Focal length:
    6.6 mm
Flash:
    flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode (16)
Metering mode:
    pattern (5)

My favorite:

Make:
    Canon
Model:
    Canon PowerShot A570 IS
F stop:
    F/2.8
Exposure:
    1/125 sec.
Focal length:
    6.6 mm
Flash:
    flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode (16)
Metering mode:
    pattern (5)

I took several of these and the best four are in the album. Because of the light middle framed by the dark pines, I prefer the vertical orientation the best, although there is one decent landscape shot in the album.

Comments or critiques are always welcome.

Enjoy,
Tim

 

[Kevin Judy and Emma]

Both

I like them both. If I had to choose, I guess I'd say that the one with Earl is not as good because his dark clothing makes it hard to distinguish that it is a human form without really studying it. Both very nice, though.

KDT

 

[MichaelJ]

A570IS - nice. It was on my short list with the A720IS, which I ended up with. Canon's little A-series cameras with big lenses do take some gorgeous photos.

 

[forestgnome]

Tim, nice composition! I also like the second one.

I'm interested in the '6.6mm' value. What does that mean? My idea of 6.6mm would be extreme fisheye. Did you mean 66mm?

happy trails

 

[bikehikeskifish]

Tim, nice composition! I also like the second one.

I'm interested in the '6.6mm' value. What does that mean? My idea of 6.6mm would be extreme fisheye. Did you mean 66mm?

happy trails

Focal Length : 6.6mm (35mm equivalent: 39.1mm)

Depends on which Exif tool you use to get the values...

Tim

 

[DougPaul]

Focal Length : 6.6mm (35mm equivalent: 39.1mm)

Depends on which Exif tool you use to get the values...

Canon puts both the real and 35mm equivalent focal lengths in the EXIF data. One tool which prints out everything and also allows one to manipulate the data is exiftool: http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/. Written in Perl and runs on a wide variety of OSes. Free.

Doug

 

[bikehikeskifish]

Canon puts both the real and 35mm equivalent focal lengths in the EXIF data. One tool which prints out everything and also allows one to manipulate the data is exiftool: http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/. Written in Perl and runs on a wide variety of OSes. Free.

Doug

I used exactly that tool for the 39.1 value. For the original post, I was lazy and copied it off of webshots...

Tim

 

[DougPaul]

I used exactly that tool for the 39.1 value. For the original post, I was lazy and copied it off of webshots...

I use a perl script as a wrapper to collect the desired info and make a formatted table. Eg:

file    time      F    iso   eFL    FL   FLM   cam
0001    1/60     2.8   200    27     5    17   SD800
0002    1/60     2.8    81    27     5    17   SD800
0003    1/25     5.8   200   102    17    17   SD800
0077    1/500   16.0  1600    27    17    85   XTi

eFL=equivalent (35mm) FL
FLM=FL max, identifies the lens

Doug

 

[NewHampshire]

The only thing I would like to see is some nice clouds to add to the scene, but that is totally outside your control. Other than that it looks well done.

Brian

 

[Grumpy]

The first frame, the one with Big Earl in the foreground, would work much better with some flash fill light to bring Earl out of the deep shadows.

Of the two images, I prefer the second for its literal reflection. Recommend cropping some off either the top or bottom to improve composition – make a choice as to whether foreground or background is the point of emphasis. Either crop works, and each conveys a noticeably different impression of the scene.

Interesting side discussion about metadata.

If shooting data are provided, converting lens focal length to 35mm film equivalent (EFL) probably is good thing to do, automatically, in these discussions. That gives us a common frame of reference for the ongoing debate over which FL is best for what.

In this case, I note the 6.6mm FL works out to a 39mm EFL (35mm film eq.). That puts it very close to the true “normal” EFL of 43mm, leaning a tad toward the wide angle side. It sort of reinforces my old thinking that the most useful EFL range for hiking photographers generally would be from 28-35mm at the short end and around 85-105mm at the long end.

More about metadata.

I use the “File Info” feature in Photoshop daily, to record essential caption data for each assignment. This is the who-what-when-where-why-how stuff, and copyright info, entered in spaces provided in the first “File Info” pane that opens.

Batch processing allows basic caption information to be attached very quickly to each image in a shoot; further caption info (people’s names, e.g.) can be added to individual images, as necessary.

Capability to quickly and easily attach this kind of information to batches and individual images makes the all-important first step a snap when it comes to building a really functional image archive or catalog. The old paper-based way was extremely arduous by comparison.

G.

 

[bikehikeskifish]

Since I originally posted this, I experimented with several different crops. I even removed the snowy branch in the lower left as in the cropped version, I found it distracting. Due to the natural vertical framing of the trees, I found the vertical orientation was much more pleasing to my eye, and more accurately portrays "what I saw".

Here is my favorite crop, which is more square than the original, with a slight emphasis on the reflection. I'm pretty sure a GND filter would have made the sky as blue as its reflection. Removing more of the darker framing does change the mood considerably and I'm really not sure which I like better now.



I also played with the horizontal as I was thinking of putting in a calendar, but there is too much extraneous information in the horizontal image.



Happy Thanksgiving,
Tim

 

[Grumpy]

Your "favorite crop" does greatly improve the composition, to my eye.

G.

 

[kmorgan]

A couple of Photoshop enhancements of the pics from your album:



and...



Kevin

 

[bikehikeskifish]

Nice! Now Earl is much more obvious...

Tim

 

[kmorgan]

Ok, this one I really needed to spend more time with (you can see where I didn't select well enough around the tree tops). What I did here was take the first corrected image and paste a copy of the original onto a new layer. I used "Color Select" to get as much of the sky as possible and chose blue from the water to paint with.

Using a fuzzy brush with 25% opacity I painted the sky around the mountain inside the selection. I kept going back over the sky, concentrating on getting the upper part darker.

I then made a mask using the selection to just allow the darkened sky to show through on top of the other image. Flattened, saved as a jpeg and here's what I got...



Not perfect, but an example of how you might get the sky darker. I would normally do it with curves, but the sky is too washed out to adjust.

Kevin

 

[bikehikeskifish]

I think the GND would be the 'right' solution to exposing properly in the camera, something I don't have readily available with the P&S.

Thanks for the suggestions and explanations, Kevin.

Tim

 

[kmorgan]

More Photoshop magic/cheating

Another solution...



even better, fixed up the mask to better blend the sky....