* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #864 / Revived #084 on 2024 11 06 *

A bit of HDR effect but I really like the photo.
I think you used the full dynamic range of the camera.
The composition, the vibrant colors and the sensitive post-processing make this photo a feast for the eyes.

Very informative, very interesting.
I'm surprised at the ideas the artists come up with.
I would have liked to have seen the photo with the flags a bit bigger, i.e. more pixels.

Is there a convention that says that, in a scene like that with very little sky content, the sky should be blue or is that your personal opinion?

My personal opinion is that an exposure beyond ETTR followed by a slight increase of the shadows and an increase in mid-tone contrast would be more toward @minniev's preference. For example:

Thanks, Mike -

I was not consciously lining up the diagonal line of flowers with the shadow line during the "shoot." The contrast between the different elements in the scene was different than the photograph conveys. The room was very bright with light in a way that doesn't come through here. But from several images taken over about 20 minutes, this one "felt right" to me. The shadow was moving across the wall during that time, changing the relationships.

Rich

Very good photos.
A pleasure to look at.

I don't usually do it, but I saw a lot of potential in this photo.
So I edited it, I hope you don't mind.

In my opinion, two things could be improved:
1.) The sunlight in autumn is very strong, so the photo should look much more dynamic. The photo seems to have been taken in such a way that the highlights are protected, but the rest of the photo suffers as a result.
2.) At least some detail should be visible in the roots of the tree so that you can see what happened to the tree.

I'm not sure what Mike means by "perfect exposure". Perfect/optimum exposure means different things to different people.

He said it needs to be "perfect" to get blue skies in scenes like yours and I showed why it does not, at least for me.

I answered that question earlier this thread.

I am following this discussion and I don't think it will lead to a result that everyone involved is happy with.
I know the dynamic range of my cameras and how much I can overexpose, so I can make everything right in post-processing.
In this respect, it is not important which exposure Minniev chose.
The important thing is that she achieved a very good result.

That is the point I was making in that the exposure does not need to be "perfect" to get blue skies in scenes like minniev's.

In the GIMP, it looks like you were defeated by the blue channel in this image. Lots of bottomed (almost 14%) and blown (13%) blue values but few in-between ... whereas the red and green histograms look quite normal. When a channel is bottomed to 14% of the count, those pixels become bi-chromatic (only red and green in this case) which is unusual in nature. Similarly, blown pixels may not look right after an attempt at highlight recovery.

The raw histogram would be really interesting, if available.

This kind of thing can happen when Saturation is edited to taste in a wide color space and then the image is converted to sRGB for posting on the web. For example, the classic yellow flower shot coming out with 100% saturated petals in sRGB with no blues in the pixels.

P.S. Messed with the blue channel attempting to recover it - no surprise as to the result:

Forget it. Anybody else?

No problem.

That is way too light now on my screen and not realistic given the sun is low and to the right of the scene judging by the direction and length of the shadow.

Alan's original looks much better to me except I would have lightened the shadows just a little bit, not as much as you did.

Let me have a go. No, Dan didn't answer this earlier (and his use of colour in his own shots doesn't show much awareness of the issue.) There is no such convention. What makes it important in minniev's photo is that it is a complementary colour to the golden tones of the leaves. Having the blue in the sky (and it doesn't need much) enriches the autumn feel because it alters our perception of the leaves. That's what made it perfect.