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Great shot of Guitar Lk. I'm wondering if that's an unretouched image. If that were mine (and I wish it were), I'd want to enhance it a little to make the darker portions (the mountains) a little more visible (I left the sky and lake as-is): <img src="http://hometown.aol.com/powergui/pics/glake-small.jpg" /> What's the feeling on embellishing pictures like this?
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That is an untouched photo. I'm not really familiar on how to lighten the mountains while leaving the sky untouched. Please explain. I have Photoshop 7 and don't think embelishing photos is so bad if they can look even better. Thanks for your comments and let me know how you did it!
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If I've got the technique right??? Taken July 16/17, 2003 Okay, what would sunrise at Trail Camp be like without the reflection off the roof of the solar toilet? <img src=http://fjk98103.home.att.net/DSCN2381.JPG> Here's another sunrise over the water source: <img src=http://fjk98103.home.att.net/DSCN2385.JPG? Moonset over the "Switchback Ridge": <img src=http://fjk98103.home.att.net/DSCN2376.JPG> And the next morning but I have no idea who my subject was but they were stalling the hike in the morning chill: <img src=http://fjk98103.home.att.net/DSCN2429.JPG>
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"What's the feeling on embellishing pictures like this?" To me it cheapens the photo. I go to great lengths to take pictures that don't need adjusting...which is much easier with the boom of digital photography. Take 200 pictures...keep the good ones and delete the bad ones. And although I don't like to, I occasionaly adjust some of my pics - including the sunset I posted above. Most of them look good to me so I adjust them to try to make them look pleasing to everyone else. Here's the original..  You can see the color is a bit different. I think if you only marginally change some of the parameters you're in good shape. But there's a point at which pics looks processed and fake....when you can tell is when you've gone too far. I try to remain true to what I saw when I took the pic, but workig on a laptop hinders that quite a bit. Becuase of the angle of the screen, if I move my head up or down a few inches it changes the brightness/contrast quite a but. I have no idea if those pics look good on a normal screen...so I end up guessing.
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Joined: Dec 2003
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Joe, I don't feel that there is anything wrong with "tweaking" a photo a little if the end result is a more spectacular image. The key though, is to not tweak the picture so much that it looks tweaked. Even the great master, Ansel Adams, in effect, tweaked his photo's. He would spend hours in a dark room exposing a negative for various intervals until the subject was to his liking or exposing one area of a photo while the rest was covered for a longer period of time. The famous pictures of El Cap, Half Dome, Methusula Tree,etc. have all been altered in some way, shape or form.
To Strive, To Seek, To Find, and Not To Yield.
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My late father-in-law was a semi-professional photogapher who had the good fortune to be able to retire early (age 55) and, with his wife, travel to (and photograph) many places throughout the world during their last 15 years together -- always taking tons of pictures. At the time of his death in January 2001, he was still taking pictures with film, but was on the verge of making the switch to digital (he already had switched in some areas).
From my years of observing his photography and talking with him about his photography, he always said that the art of producing a final developed/printed photograph is called "making" a picture, not "taking" a picture, precisely because there is more to the final product than just triggering the shutter in the camera. Even when developing film and printing the negatives onto paper by using chemicals, etc., he could (and often did) "tweak" the picture before achieving a desired final product (mainly to make sure the final product looked as close as possible to what he saw when he first took the picture). My father-in-law often went through several "drafts" at developing/printing a picture before it became a "keeper", and sometimes we would be able to see the discarded drafts on his darkroom floor -- drafts that were either too light, too dark, too much of this or that color or contrast, etc. -- all of which occurred *after* the actual picture was "taken". Even though he never lived to use a digital camera, yet he did have a slide scanner, as well as Photo Shop, and would scan in and tweak many of his "keeper" slides.
My wife has now stepped into his "shoes" as the family photographer, and has made great strides since doing so. Like many of you, she uses a digital camera, and even prints all her own pictures on an Epson photographic quality color printer, so that we almost never set foot in a photo developer store, unless it is hardware related. Her "darkroom" is our computer and Photo Shop. Either way she is "making" pictures just like her dad did, only without all the smelly chemicals and with less expensive equipment. But the entire process -- lining up the picture, shooting it, downloading it, "tweaking" it (only if necessary), and printing it -- are all the component parts of "making" a picture.
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Exactly CaT! Does your wife have a website where she shows her pictures?
To Strive, To Seek, To Find, and Not To Yield.
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<img src=http://www.summitpost.com/images/59677.jpg>
To Strive, To Seek, To Find, and Not To Yield.
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Wow! Nice reflection picture! Iceberg Lake?
She has a hosted "web site" on Nikon.net, but has only one family event type picture on that site. We need to upload some of her better stuff on there; but so far, putting her stuff on the Internet has not been a priority; she just prints stuff for personal use mostly. Even though I'm fairly computer and Internet savvy, and have had programming classes, yet learning how to create a web page has been the one lone hold-out area for me, which I have not yet tackled.
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Actually it's the southern(?) most of the Hitchcock Lakes from a vantage point near Mt Muir.
Well, let us all know if and when you start to get some of your wife's pictures up on the net, it's always nice to look at pics from people who know what they are doing. I've lost count of how many photo classes and seminars that I've taken and I still can't capture light correctly. Thank goodness for digital, now I sort look like I know what I'm doing.
To Strive, To Seek, To Find, and Not To Yield.
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I guess I take more a of documentary rather than artistic approach...trying to stay true to what I saw.
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Great shots! High Sierra Topix Albums: <a href=http://www.highsierratopix.com/community/album.php>http://www.highsierratopix.com/community/album.php</a>
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