MiRF Photos - Sunday Sep 6

[Xanthenes The Unbalanced]

Random stuff shot while rambling around Holly today.  A slideshow of the rest of the 2009 MiRF set (40+ shots and counting) can be found at:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/21849679@N06/sets/72157622010876021/show/

[Xanthenes The Unbalanced]

[lady M]

Awesome slide show. Thanks for sharing.

[Xanthenes The Unbalanced]

Awesome slide show. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you, m'lady.  If there's an event all year that's easier to walk away from with decent and/or interesting shots, I haven't yet found it.

[Ambios]

Again, all I can say is....wonderful.  Hmmm...ever think of visiting Holly Grove's "sister shire" of Fittleworth in Tampa?  (Feb-Apr)?

[uhurainmi]

a fresh new outlook, very entertaining slideshow!

[Xanthenes The Unbalanced]

a fresh new outlook, very entertaining slideshow!

Thank you!  After shooting commercial and corporate stuff for a year, RenFest is always a welcome break.  It's really tough to run out of stuff to shoot, and the stuff you shoot you can't find anywhere else.

[Xanthenes The Unbalanced]

Again, all I can say is....wonderful.  Hmmm...ever think of visiting Holly Grove's "sister shire" of Fittleworth in Tampa?  (Feb-Apr)?

Thank you!  Heck, I wasn't even aware that we had a "sister shire".  Hmmmmm, I *do* have family down by Tampa.....

[Capt Gabriela Fullpepper]

Brillant photo work. I admire what you have done and hope someday my work is as good.

HUZZAH to you!

[Xanthenes The Unbalanced]

Brillant photo work. I admire what you have done and hope someday my work is as good.

HUZZAH to you!

Thanks, m'lady.  By the way, I've checked out your photo site.  Your stuff is fantastic.

[Capt Gabriela Fullpepper]

Why thank you m'lord. I take that as one heck of a compliment and will charish it. Thank you again and HUZZAH!

[DeadBishop]

I love the unique quality your photos have.  What exactly do you do to give them that rich look?

[Xanthenes The Unbalanced]

I love the unique quality your photos have.  What exactly do you do to give them that rich look?

Thanks, DB!  I kind of split my two photo styles into hard and soft.  I may then choose to ramp up color or crush blacks or blow out whites (something that would likely get me kicked out of a hundred college Photography courses) or go to black and white or sepia or duotone or whatever.  But I always start with hard and soft.  Do I want to push detail or suppress it?  

If I want to push it, I usually run the tonal contrast route.  I was at fredmiranda.com a few years ago talking with some folks who absolutely kick my arse and one of them had these striking photos (that still kick my arse) and he suggested I start googling some Photoshop tutorials on tonal contrast.  So, it's all tonal contrast and selectively pushing colors.  Most times, I need to brush back to the original background (as in the first picture), because too much of that screwing around will kill a good bokeh.  In the second shot, there wasn't as much bokeh to worry about so I just screwed around with the entire photo.  One exposure, more tonal range than a normal photograph, not nearly as much as an HDR.

For soft I just run some skin softening, jack up the blacks for some deeper shadows, selective color boost, etc.  The one thing I like to do with single subjects, and I don't do it all the time (and it probably isn't for everyone), is design a quick black to white luminance matte to create a little more light falloff away from the subject (if it isn't there naturally or if I'm not carrying enough lighting gear).  I like the more natural ramp of a gradient matte as opposed to just burning the edges, but sometimes I just run out of patience and burn.

Hmmmm...I hope any of that actually made sense to someone.  I just realized how late it is and how much I just rambled.

Speaking of "how to", how bout you tell us a couple of your tricks for turning out such unbelievably good HDRs?  

[Xanthenes The Unbalanced]

Heh.  I just got around to reading the thread about your HDRs.  Okay, either forget that request or get ready to give up "a month of Sundays".   

[DeadBishop]

Hey, no problem.  I kinda followed what you were describing, but like most things, I learn from direct experience rather than descriptions.  Just like what you described, some details require boosting, while others require suppressing. 

The falloff is one thing I noticed (on the knight image, for instance), and I usually do a dark vignetting, but I like the falloff quality of yours.  How do you do your luminance matte?

Another thing I noticed with my HDR that I see similar things happening in some of your photos (again the first image of the knight) is that there tends to be a lot of noise, particularly when there is blue sky.  I found selecting just that part of the image, and then boosting the median noise filter helps smooth that out without losing detail in the bokeh.

[Xanthenes The Unbalanced]

Hey, no problem.  I kinda followed what you were describing, but like most things, I learn from direct experience rather than descriptions.  Just like what you described, some details require boosting, while others require suppressing. 

The falloff is one thing I noticed (on the knight image, for instance), and I usually do a dark vignetting, but I like the falloff quality of yours.  How do you do your luminance matte?

Another thing I noticed with my HDR that I see similar things happening in some of your photos (again the first image of the knight) is that there tends to be a lot of noise, particularly when there is blue sky.  I found selecting just that part of the image, and then boosting the median noise filter helps smooth that out without losing detail in the bokeh.

I actually do my falloff mattes outside Photoshop.  I do them in Adobe AfterEffects.  While I could do them in Photoshop, the workflow of AfterEffects makes it a bit quicker to run through a batch than with Photoshop.  Since I probably do 80% video/20% photography, my natural inclination seems to be toward AE. 

And that's a great point about direct experience.  I have a really hard time describing my Photoshop processes, because so much of it is still just trial and error; unless I specifically know the look I want in a photo right when I sit down (which is rare).  Most times, I just knock the photo around until it starts looking like what I saw in my head when I took the darn thing. 

I would make the world's worst Photoshop teacher.

[Rani Zemirah]

Wow... you guys are better than good-tutorials.com... and I'm starting to feel a bit like a sponge that's reaching the saturation point!  LOL  

I have discovered one thing with working blind in Photoshop, though.  If I'm playing around, but think I may want to reproduce the effects of something I'm experimenting with, I'll set my Actions palette to record, and that way I can go back later and look at every step, see where I backtracked, what I changed, where I screwed something up, etc... and eventually puzzle out how I arrived at the end product.  Then I can (occasionally) copy the useful steps into a new Action and apply it in batch, or individually, to achieve the same, or at least a similar, result.  Or, even if that's not possible, I can keep the palette open as a guideline...

I think I need to start a glossary for myself, though... I'm learning lots of new (to me) terms here!