Cynicor wrote:
> frederick wrote:
>
>> Cynicor wrote:
>>
>>> I've always worked in color, but I gave some B&W conversion a try
>>> today. Are these decent at all or are they just snapshots without
>>> color? (4 pix.)
>>>
>>> http://trupin.smugmug.com/gallery/1401859/
>>
>>
>> My 2c worth:
>> http://trupin.smugmug.com/gallery/1401859/1/66329135
>> really works for me in B&W. For printing, maybe some PP to bring up
>> shadow detail in the trunk.
>> The others, IMHO may be better in colour.
>> I am assumimg from Exif data that you used a w/a zoom lens at 11mm for
>> the above shot. A suggestion is not to use this lens at less than f8,
>> as there is considerable softness, particularly away from centre-frame
>> at wider settings accentuated towards the edges at this focal length.
>> There are only two lenses AFAIK that you could have used - which one
>> was it?
>
>
> Thanks, Frederick - I appreciate the feedback. It was in fact the
> Tamron. Maybe I should've also pushed it up to at least 12 or 13 mm as
> well. It's definitely a bit soft, and it also has a noticeable red/cyan
> shift in many photos. I had dodged the trunk somewhat to bring out
> detail, but I might try a bit more.
>
> I am just teaching myself how to convert effectively into black and
> white in PS, but I thought that I got the detail and contrast OK on
> these. The first one might be a little washed-out.
To add confusion, the shadow detail visible is going to depend on how
the image is printed or which screen it's viewed on, let alone how you
want it to look.
I took a similar image a few days ago using my Sigma 10-20. It was a
late on a cloudy dark day, camera set a aperture priority, shutter speed
1/6 second f8. You can use shutter speeds this low with these extreme
w/a lenses without much problem, roughly equivalent to using 1/30 with a
50mm lens - a hit rate of 50% or better is achievable, and at 1/15
second, no particular care is needed to avoid camera shake. The Sigma
is noticeably sharper at f8 than f5.6 away from center frame - and I
expect the Tamron (and the others) are the same. These lenses are a lot
of fun to use - but I don't find it easy to view a scene with my eyes
and imagine what the viewfinder will show. I am a learner. It probably
looks silly when I am out taking photos - I end up crawling around on
hands and knees waving the camera around at odd angles peering through
the viewfinder - like a kid peering through the wrong end of binoculars.
They are great lenses for photographing children - close up from a
very low level with a sharply rendered but distorted background and big
sky. I really like the look as it seems to me to be how the world
really looked from my eyes when I was a child. Strangely (maybe not)
kids seem to like the photos a lot, but many adults think they look
weird. It would be interesting to hand a camera with such w/a view to a
small child for a day, and see what they did with it (yeah - they would
first grind the front element into some rocks, then trip up and drop the
whole thing into a pond). But, as their concepts of "personal space"
are different from ours, they won't hesitate to get right up close to
isolate the subject, and can probably do a great job of composition
without having to think about it. Maybe I will get better at
composition if I suffer an infantile regression in my dotage. In the
meantime it's quite hard work.
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