saturn wrote:Waiting in a restaurant for our food. Played a bit with my 28mm f2.8 manual focus, had to set aperture and shutterspeed myself without metering
What should be done with something like this one in photoshop?
I took it today, got a bunch of this butterfly when I was outside working. It let me get pretty close without flying off. Forgive the amateurishness of things like...well...whatever goes into taking a good close-up picture.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, there's not much you can do to fix that one in Photoshop. The color quality is nice overall except perhaps it could use a little contrast. The best thing you can do is size it down about 50%. Unless you're printing or making wallpaper, images on the web look best at about 500-800 px in the longest dimension... Any larger and you can't see the whole thing at once on the screen and any little ugly details pop out like a sore thumb. If you look at some of the "best" photos on flickr at full size--the sharp as a tack ones with hypersaturated color--they often look like crap
What I see is that it seems to be "suffering" from a lack of depth of field and/or some motion blur. The back wing might to be out of focus, but it could also be moving. You need long shutter speeds (and a tripod) to increase depth of field, but you need short shutter speeds to freeze motion. It's a bit of a balancing act... The brown background is a bit distracting since the color is so close to the butterfly. Put a standard blue tarp on the ground and retake it and you'll see what I mean.
I didn't say it sucked It's more an issue of incorporating colors that don't blend. Here's a cool little guide about color I found on Apple's website the other day:
Here's another one, smaller. And yea, I know you didn't say it sucked. I feel like a rank amateur posting any of my pictures on here though, what with all the photographers we have here.
thanks for the link. I'll look over that. So much goes into taking a good picture and I know absolutely none of it.
A lot of the stuff you don't even think about until after you've taken the picture, but it does help you see things when they do pop up and also helps when you're done taking pictures during the editing process (when you decide which photos go and which stay, not which to Photoshop)--which I think is even more helpful.
I was in Chapters the other day and noticed the July issue of Pop photo was already out so I proceeded to flip through the pages looking for my own pic. There it was on page 61 in one of the feature stories titled "Miracles in Low Light". Roughly 5"x3" puny in size sitting in the middle section of the right page along 3 others, unnaturally oversaturated with a blimp of a footnote below it titled "Sci-Fi City".
There's more stuff written, mostly amateur advice, which I ain't gonna bore you with but I'll just say that my initial reaction was...."bleh, WTF happened to my pic". I then proceeded outside to smoke a fatty and showed it to my photography friends and then we proceeded making fun of the crappy print.
I shoot with the aperture closed all of the way down quite a bit... I assume you do as well? I mean, if someone is going to worry about the little bit of noise generated at ISO 400, then they might as well know about all the other things that can go wrong. Perhaps you'd like to share your thoughs on the subject.
i believe that certain aperture look better then others..
espeicially on zoom type lenses at diff zoom positions.
i usually dont use the smallest openings to avoid difraction.
altho on my vid cam if conditions are very harsh, i'll close it down all the way to introduse some difraction cus it has a softening/contrast cutting effect that i like.
saturn wrote:Waiting in a restaurant for our food. Played a bit with my 28mm f2.8 manual focus, had to set aperture and shutterspeed myself without metering
plained wrote:i believe that certain aperture look better then others..
espeicially on zoom type lenses at diff zoom positions.
i usually dont use the smallest openings to avoid difraction.
altho on my vid cam if conditions are very harsh, i'll close it down all the way to introduse some difraction cus it has a softening/contrast cutting effect that i like.
It's more an issue of incorporating colors that don't blend. Here's a cool little guide about color I found on Apple's website the other day: 
