General Chat / The Offical Photography Thread

Have a look at the bracketing function of your camera. No need to use any wheels while taking the shots.

trip to cali:









random shots in europe:


amsterdam!


bern!


and of course berlin.


any suggestions welcome, but be nice ? sorry about the size for the cali pics, but before i came to europe i had to make copies and resize them so that they would fit on my memory stick. i just want to have them to look at

Oh man, Amsterdam and Berlin! Two places I visited two years ago!

I miss Europe.

I really like the way that you've missed the nearest support on the bridge from San Fran, and as such it seems to impossibly reach out to you.

Al, lovely picture, very busy foreground though, which really distracts from the sky. I like the forum stretching off on both sides. As for the sky itself, the right half is fantastic, but there's not enough contrast with the left top corner, it just seems to fade out.. do you understand what i'm getting at? I haven't been very clear.

No, I know what you're getting at. That's what I'm *trying* to do but not really doing.

That is why you are should sent over the files ...
Can't say what is possible without seeing the original images.

Suggested Crop:



I don't like the ratio of the crop, but can I think sorts out the confusion in the foreground and leads the eye around the whole image.

Nice idea, but I don't think it works. The sky drags the eyes left to right, while the forum drags it right to left. The foreground doesn't really take them anywhere. It confuses me much more than the last one.

damn, i haven't posted on this board in ages...
magnus! your work flow is extremely interesting. i was so convinced when reading it that i immediately decided to adopt it. i need to move towards a RAW work flow, i feel. can you see noticeable differences between raw and jpeg?

Hey, nice to see your name here again.

The raw vs. jpeg question is one a lot of photographers are discussing and everybody has to find out what suits his photographic task the best.

My camera usually is set to raw + jpeg fine which allows me to use the advantages of raw and jpeg.


The main advantages of raw:
- white balance can be adjusted without loosing quality
- better dynamic range (at least 2EV for my nikon d300)
- 12 or 14bit pictures (compared to 8bit for jpeg)
- better noise reduction

The main disadvanteges of raw:
- more computer work
- bigger files
- slower to work on
- a lot of people forget over raw, that one still needs to know how to handle the camera on location


I am not a reporter and do not need to send pictures to clients within a couple of hours after shooting, which allows me to use raw.
When I am shooting outdoor or with mixed light sources it is hard to find the correct white balance on location. Often the auto white balance returns wrong values and therefore I need raw already. The higher dynamic range and 12/14bit images allow to edit the pictures without loosing as much quality. This especially is helpful when lightening shadows.
Under perdetermined conditions (i.e. studio photography) one usually does not need raw.

As mentioned above I am using raw and jpeg. When I am documenting a concert for instance a lot of pictures are prefect out of the camera already (apart from cropping and maybe perspective corrections) and I can use the jpeg file, but still have the raw so I can switch to that if I want to edit the picture. Of course this means one picture needs about 20Mb on my hard disk (15Mb raw + 5Mb jpeg), but with the current hard disk prices that argument against raw+jpeg is not valid anymore.


Just some brief introduction into raw+jpeg.
If you have any questions feel free to contact me.

Magnus

So Bill Clinton came to speak today so I brought my camera. ISO was pretty high so it's pretty grainy, so I tried to remedy some of it. Not too spectacular but I'm just glad I got to witness him speak in person. The image quality is shit but this is what I ended up with. I was sitting pretty far away from the stage too.


Chancellor Oblinger's Introduction


Horribly cheesy effects, I know


Chancellor Oblinger and Bill


Bill onstage as an award is presented in his name


Since I was in Reynolds Coliseum already, I had the foresight to take a picture of Kay Yow's banners. RIP

The project I have been talking about all the time.

30s exposure, lightened by 2 flashes - moved through the room - that fired about 40-50 times.

So I finally got around to posting some photos from my trip to Sequoia National Park, last May... yeah... MAY... They're the "WHAT'S RECENT" on my web site.

Favorite gallery was from Tokopah Falls, which we did the morning before we left. That one was like a winter wonderland.

Anyway, yeah... it's eye candy. Some of the pics Magnus would probably tear apart, but there might be a couple that even he could approve of, within those six galleries...

(Leaching off Facebook for my previews.)





















They're not all black and white, just the ones I'm posting here... mostly because once I realized I had a trend, I didn't feel like breaking it. lol

(as usual, if the galleries are stuck on "Loading Image" for more than a few seconds, refresh the page and it should work)

Holy crap, those look amazing. Third to last is my favorite, looks so epic.

Picasa Album

I set this up, but haven't gotten very far with uploading pictures. So far I've only sorted through and uploaded the best of my pictures from 2005 and some of 2006. So I still have quite a few more albums to go through, but here are my best.

Al, wow, second to last, could you send that for a desktop? It's so intriguing!

BTW, unless you've been there, you really can't get a real sense of scale of how big Sequoias really are... until you look at something like this picture and notice the people (behind the base of the Sequoia).

Goliath @ Walibi World

Those are looking amazing, Corkscrewed!

I love travels!
Here are some pictures of Berlin: (I didn't edit those images yet)
Had been there in last summer for the first time, and it's a great city!
















I hate always to see the quality get lost...

I'd like to see some nepalish pictures.

^^ I've been to all those places!!!