The Lemon Fool

AleisterCrowley wrote:St Cross?

Yes but no St Bernard!

John

Your dog is a trained Ninja, I had to go up to 400% magnification to overcome it's camouflage.

Spot the Dog competition. Put an x against your best guess.

(whatever happened to Spot the ball? I can remember my dad doing it. And SunPlan 40 on the pools..)

We all know eagles are big birds, but without context it's sometimes difficult to picture how big they are.

Enter context.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-h ... s-43307984

Scott.

Here's a more typical image of a white-tailed sea eagle that I took myself last year at Ardnamurchan.



Scott.

That looks familiar - I must have looked it up on Wikipedia recently, or perhaps it was on the BBC

[edit] Aha, BBC late last year. They don't know who actually owns it...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-n ... d-41941126

I had a request to mark the position of my dog in my previous post. Here it is:

That's one very strange looking dog?? Still none the wiser

Its a bit like this view.

https://www.weirdoptics.com/dalmatian-c ... -illusion/

My dog is a White Parson Russell Terrier with dark ears, wearing a dark coat. She is walking away from the camera.

John

redsturgeon wrote:Its a bit like this view.

https://www.weirdoptics.com/dalmatian-c ... -illusion/

My dog is a White Parson Russell Terrier with dark ears, wearing a dark coat. She is walking away from the camera.

John

Took me a few minutes but saw him in the end. He looks very small in this pic. Fab pic.

Mel

redsturgeon wrote:Its a bit like this view.

https://www.weirdoptics.com/dalmatian-c ... -illusion/

My dog is a White Parson Russell Terrier with dark ears, wearing a dark coat. She is walking away from the camera.

John

I spotted the Dalmation immediately..

Mind you, I did have a job spotting Dalmations once.

They all come out of the factory white (like Ford vans) and the spots have to be applied by hand.

Am I the only person who gets a bit annoyed about high-level photoshopping? I'm not talking so much about touching up the contrast or the light and shade. What I object to is wholesale cut-and-paste, and the presentation of the results as award-winning "photographs". They're not photographs, dammit, they're imaginative artworks.

Grrr. Get a load of this lot, from the so-called "Sony World Photography Awards": http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-43472907

"The beautiful Mount Olstinden has almost the same shape as the roof of this cute yellow cabin. And the yellow colour creates some amazing contrast to the snow-covered mountain......Beiter has made a few changes. He said: "I've removed a small cabin in the left side during post process. Beside that, colour correction, contrast and sharpness has been done in Lightroom and Photoshop."

Righhhht. So it's not the true view, it's not the true colour, and an inconvenient building has been wiped out of the view. But hey, the world's a better place. Give that man a Fake News award, not a photography prize.

Richard Frishman's Sunday Buffet at Jerry Mikeska's BBQ won the Still Life section. "I found this curious juxtaposition while looking for lunch in rural Texas, the heart of hunting country," he said."Authentic to the scene depicted, this highly detailed image is constructed of over 100 individual photographs meticulously stitched together."

Grrr again. It might be art, but it ain't photography. Anybody agree?

BJ

bungeejumper wrote:

Richard Frishman's Sunday Buffet at Jerry Mikeska's BBQ won the Still Life section. "I found this curious juxtaposition while looking for lunch in rural Texas, the heart of hunting country," he said."Authentic to the scene depicted, this highly detailed image is constructed of over 100 individual photographs meticulously stitched together."

Grrr again. It might be art, but it ain't photography. Anybody agree?

From Google image search, Mikeska's Bar-B-Q does look exactly like the picture. So I'm not sure why 100 photographs had to be stitched together. Extra high resolution maybe? Or getting everything in focus at once?

Scott.

I suppose your view on photoshop depends a lot on what you are trying to achieve. For some people they like to capture a scene in the camera and not mess with it too much apart from a few contrast and exposure tweeks.

That's fine but I would not denigrate those for whom the original image is merely the starting point for the creation of an image they have in their head.

In these days of digital photography, some sort of post processing work is almost essential, sharpening, contrast, white balance, exposure, saturation levels are just the start and when you shoot in RAW then post process work is absolutely essential to get a decent image.

Even Ansel Adams used to do a lot of work on his prints in order to produce an image that had a lot more impact that the original negative.

I love the photos in the link, the forest one especially.

These days of course most photos are taken with smart phones and the automatic processing that goes on there is far beyond what most people would do manually.

John

redsturgeon wrote:That's fine but I would not denigrate those for whom the original image is merely the starting point for the creation of an image they have in their head

Nor would I, but can we please stop pretending that it's a photograph? So if I decide to double the crowd numbers at Trump's inauguration, is that all right because it's only a bit of enhancement, after all?

Rhetorical question, obviously, but the questions about the truth of a photograph have been around since the Moscow Red Square photos of the cold war, when the people on Brezhnev's May Day platform were judged according to where the post-production teams had chosen to place them. It doesn't seem to me that we've advanced very far - indeed, we seem to be moving backward to a ubiquitous acceptance that this sort of deliberate photographic falsehood is acceptable.

On the other hand, I have a beautiful photo here of a pair of otters playing basketball. It's a dead cert for the BBC wildlife calendar.

BJ

OK Bj but I think we need to make a distinction between a news photo that is some sort of depiction of what occurred at an actual event and is taken for the purpose of an accurate visual record and on the other hand an image that someone has created to look a certain way because that was the image they wanted to make for the purpose of giving other people pleasure from looking at it.

Even in the most straightforward photograph though, there are decisions that a photographer makes that can all change the message given. The choice of the moment when to press the shutter is key but what focal length of lens to use, what shutter speed, how to frame the image, what viewpoint to take, whether to make a black and white or colour image, these were all decisions that had to be made before the advent of photoshop and digital photography.

So even an image of an event straight out of the camera can look very different and can show many different "truths" about one moment without being tampered with in any way after the event.

There really is no just thing as a "pure" photographic image.

John

redsturgeon wrote:Even in the most straightforward photograph though, there are decisions that a photographer makes that can all change the message given. The choice of the moment when to press the shutter is key but what focal length of lens to use, what shutter speed, how to frame the image, what viewpoint to take, whether to make a black and white or colour image, these were all decisions that had to be made before the advent of photoshop and digital photography.

So even an image of an event straight out of the camera can look very different and can show many different "truths" about one moment without being tampered with in any way after the event.

The laws of physics say what they say. Yes, of course the photographer can choose his moment and his camera angle and his focus and his exposure, and good luck to him. If he can grab that special shot that will make him £30,000 on the front page of the Daily Mail, then why not? But some (not all, of course) of this post-production tinkering amounts to messing with the facts, as conveyed by the physics of the lens. That's where I part company with the idea that moving buildings around, or painting them yellow, can be considered a true part of the photographer's purpose.**

I have a relative who photographs professionally for the National Trust and the Forestry Commission, and who also covers many of the big archaeological digs. He gets onto his mountain bike at four in the morning to catch the sun coming up over Pen y Fan, or climbs behind a waterfall to get the right shot of the sunlight coming off the falling water. He'd spit on the floor if you mentioned Photoshop. Indeed, I've seen him do it.

BJ

**or giving Kim Kardashian a big pair of pink marshmallows.

My sister posts all these stylised/filtered etc iphone photographs on FB, and everyone says 'ooh, so lovely, you're such a great photographer', when in fact it's all just made up stuff.

My photos look very dull in comparison. But they are at least real.

Mel

I have a relative who photographs professionally for the National Trust and the Forestry Commission, and who also covers many of the big archaeological digs. He gets onto his mountain bike at four in the morning to catch the sun coming up over Pen y Fan, or climbs behind a waterfall to get the right shot of the sunlight coming off the falling water. He'd spit on the floor if you mentioned Photoshop. Indeed, I've seen him do it.

There is no substitute for being at the right place at the right time and for landscape shots in particular it is very difficult (nothing is impossible) to recreate natural effects of the light at sunrise and sunset (the so called golden hours). But I would be very surprised if your professional relative does no processing on his shots.

I too hate over processed shots, I am not a fan of over vivid enhanced colours, nor the over zealous use of HDR effects but as a semi-pro myself I can tell you that using a shot straight from the camera if using RAW format (which any pro would use) is just not done. It has to be processed for contrast, colour and sharpness at the very least...and then there's always that pesky crisp packet in the mid ground that you didn't see at the time of shooting

John

melonfool wrote:My photos look very dull in comparison.

Maybe they're just not very good?