* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #852 / Revived #072 on 2024 08 14 *

Thanks for sharing the fascinating story which makes the mysterious image even more intriguing. It looks like it goes on forever! And you managed to get a shot of that neverending series of arches with a human at the far end for dramatic emphasis as well as scale. The shapes are perfectly aligned and almost appear to be floating giving it a ghostly look. Wonderful. No matter what the camera.

I never seem to have a polarizer when I need it, so I'm usually no better off for knowing. We take our pictures with what we have, in terms of knowledge, equipment and conditions. This is an interesting object (a viewing platform in a big city, seen from another similar platform?). The humans caught inside and thus suspended look like travelers in a space ship. I'm curious what/where it is. Photos that make people curious are generally considered successful. I wouldn't bother to try to clean up the reflections, either, they are part of the story for this one.

Thanks minnie, a touch of sharpening helped a bit with the eye and feathers there. I thought the ones I was seeing were all the same species until I noticed the difference with the following one, which is I think, a Pacific Heron and possibly familiar to you? I have a version where I cloned out the oof foreground trees but I felt they provide a bit of a frame...

Classic Cars

Thank you Chris. My crop is of just Sylvester, and enough of the tractor to recognize it. He loved that thing.

The main thing to me was catching his contagious smile, which almost always disappeared if he knew you were taking his picture. I caught him off guard while we were having a fun afternoon tearing up an old stump together and pulling treasures out of the roots, stuff that was cast off by both our grandparents long ago.

Thanks Arvo, you got me thinking more creatively about the crop and the color balance. Mississippi in summer throws a yellow-green cast over everything, so I did need to beat that back a bit more.

thanks David. I agree.

Appreciate it Pete. So far I'm leaving the broken dental crown, the head cooling cloth in there. They are part of him, I agree. The color numbers were helpful. I didn't tone it down quite as much as you and Arvo did, because Mississippi in summer paints us all yellow green. Cropping further made him jump out more, a good thing.

I agree, and wished I'd taken some closer shots that day, but I had no reason to think there wouldn't be many more opportunities. I did leave enough of the tractor for it to be recognizable, since he loved it so. He had never bought a piece of brand new farm equipment before and it was his darling. The crop I used for the version I'm with right now is like yours but closer in like Arvo's. Appreciate the help.

To make him stand out as a person, I would print the photo in B&W.
How you crop the photo is up to you.

Fight

And this would be my suggestion for cropping:

I say this about nearly every image from Roel and I have no doubt that I'll be saying it again. Apologies if it becomes boring but I can't discuss any of them and overlook the use of diagonal lines to connect link foregrounds, backgrounds and to take the viewer to the subject. Roel often does this with cobbled paving in Europe. In India he finds the same thing with flagstones and shadows.
The photo is very Indian. People from different social strata in their locality.
As it shows on my small laptop, I'd like some more detail in the men's faces and the motorbike. A small amount of shadow raising would do it.

Fuschias are rich coloured with a delicate hanging form. You have captured both aspects here. The curving long this line of the stalk is continued in the stamens beneath the petals and the curve of the bud nestles alongside the curve of the main flower. I like the space left below the flower. The "hanging" nature of the flowers is one of the attractions of fuschias and the space below the subject makes the point.
Without going into pixel peeping, I think the flower has probably been brightened a little. Perhaps, perhaps not. If so, it has been carefully so it doesn't distract by being immediately obvious.
Dof/bokeh carefully selected to lift the flowers from the background.

My response is a bit skewed because I looked at the exif before writing.
800mm 1/3200 sec iso 800 and a bird in flight. That's preposterous. To get anything at all under those conditions is impressive. Or am I showing my age?
As bird photos go, we could have better plumage detail and slightly sharper focus etc. The shot is clear and detailed. The motion is stopped. The bird is totally identifiable. But. I can't get past what has been captured with the tech available.

I think we would have guessed the question you overheard from the image itself. That's an indication of the strength of the shot. Would you consider simplifying it? The photo is all about them. Possibly crop the sides in closer and take out the lower sections of the wall to emphasize the full length profiles of the happy pair.
I like the horizon and the repetition of the line at the top of the wall.
Those who can't stand saccharine sentimentality should not read any further. I couldn't help it.
Their heads are above the clouds but their feet are firmly planted on the ground.

Any chance you could get a copy of this to the happy couple?

You're not showing your age. You're showing that BIF photos are not your thing and that's fine.

The settings are pretty much what I would expect and are similar to the BIF photos I have posted in these threads.

You are panning across the sky trying to freeze a moving target with flapping wings.

Especially at similar focal lengths you need at least 1/1000s to help eliminate camera shake. I normally set a minimum shutter speed of 1/2000s to freeze flapping wings.

f/7.1 is about what I would set as well as most zoom lenses are sharpest around that aperture.

You can then let iso float via auto iso and let it land wherever the camera wants as long as important highlights are not clipped.

It is then normally a trivial task to set the final image lightness in post if required, regardless of whether you shoot raw or sooc jpeg.

I've looked long and hard at both images as big as I can get them. Minniev, I wouldn't change anything on your proposed version.
Sylvester is clear. A personality bubbles through. If I was a family member, taking out details would immediately strike me as "this wasn't him." They will remember and treasure the little idiosyncracies that your photo reminds them of.`
Trimmed down to your proposed crop, it's a revealing portrait.
I think they will love it.

I have been looking through the responses from others to minniev's photo and note that everyone wants to avoid any cleaning up. Agreed. When I wrote mine, I hadn't spotted the green cast that Pete is noting. I think he is right. On the tractor it just punches up the green and the emphasis is fine. The tractor is a character in itself and an important part of the man.
The house walls and especially Sylvestor's face might need to be adjusted slightly. Minniev, you know both and can consider whether or not it is necessary.

In both versions he doesn't stand out enough and blends a little too much into the background for my liking. I wouldn't change anything on Sylvetster.

Perhaps a crop something like this with the background set to B&W and blurred slightly to help him stand out more in the foreground. Also applied a bit of selective dodging and burning.

Just some food for thought 😊

I am interested in why you think it preposterous. I am guessing you missed a zero in the shutter speed - seeing 1/320 instead of 1/3200?

I will say that larger birds present much less a task than small birds - both finding them in the frame and following them. Also their wing beat speed is a lot lower so they don't need such a fast shutter speed to eliminate motion blur.

[Edit] One thing I will say, is that using m43 it's not a smart move to use auto ISO. One will end up with a lot of noisy pics when ISO climbs too high. I try and limit it to 800 and only ever set it to 1600 if I absolutely have to. Not everyone has the latest you beaut pp tools...

The higher noisiness in m43 is primarily due to its sensor having only a 1/4 of the area of a full frame sensor.

Consequently it receives 4 times less total light, everything else being equal, resulting in more visible noise.