Trying to dig deeper

Hello to all,
as a new member to OPF - for a while lurking before registering - I gladly take this opportunity to introduce myself.

I'm a 47 years old Geographic Information Systems specialist, living in Bad Reichenhall, Germany, and working for the Department of Health and Environment in Munich.

I am taking pictures since 30 years now - started with b&w in a small lab in the basement - and now have the opportunity and determination to develop my skills further. Digital photography just offered the right tools to delve deeper into it, even with my 3 kids and only limited spare time. I am concentrating on landscapes (urban and natural) and abstracts, portraits are at the moment reserved for family and family use, but traveling sometimes adds nice opportunities for creating pictures.

Up to now I am basically using flickr (username springm) as my medium to communicate about photography, fostering a photoblog under http://spring2life.blogspot.com. Both those facilities do not always give sufficient advice when it comes to improving my skills, so...

I am impressed of the civilized manners here and the widespread insight and cooperativeness, so I am really looking forward to some "quality time".

Markus

Welcome Markus,

I have looked at some of your pictures and it's a wrorthwhile visit to repeat. As you can see, I have taken the liberty to post here a picture from your blog [/here].


© 2007 Markus Spring "The Clocktowers of Salzburg, Austria" b&w Konica Minolta 7D

I like the tonality of the image. You wrote in your blog that B&W was achieve in "Digikam" which I first thought was some new software, LOL! Now I realize this is in-camera processing.

Still, I wonder what the advantage might be in letting the camera do this for you. Does the Minolta 7D offer various B&W versions to choose from? Can you do it after the picture is taken? Is there still a RAW image?

I can see you have a Color version of the image too. Very impressive way that Lightzone was used to preserve the clouds while bringing out the steeples insuch an impressive way.

I do have a nagging question on the dgree of sharpening. The image does have a great architectural sharpness to it, but is it perhaps a little much on the background tree to skyline interface. Or else, is it that this is the outcome of the rolloff in your selection for tone mapping in Lightzone?

Thanks so much for joining us. I hope you might start a separate thread on geomapping, to explain what you do to keep tack of each image's geo-location.

Asher

Dear Asher,

thank you for the friendly welcome and for the appreciation of one of my pictures.

Probably I should have added that I am using linux as operating system. Whilst gimp is as image editor is not on par with photoshop, there is some specialized software with merits of their own

Asher Kelman said:

I like the tonality of the image. You wrote in your blog that B&W was achieve in "Digikam" which I first thought was some new software, LOL!

Click to expand...

digikam is indeed a software which I like very much for organizing and tagging my pictures - probably now called asset management for the pros. It has some really nice image editing features, b&w conversion and cropping with compositional helps among them.

Asher Kelman said:

Now I realize this is in-camera processing.

Still, I wonder what the advantage might be in letting the camera do this for you. Does the Minolta 7D offer various B&W versions to choose from? Can you do it after the picture is taken? Is there still a RAW image?

Click to expand...

So in this case you guessed wrong - the image was taken in raw format and later edited with lightzone. I did some masking to darken the sky a little bit and masking the sharpening to the foreground subject. The finished version then was converted in digikam to b&w, using the filtering possibilities to further darken the background as it appeared to produce a more three-dimensional effect.

I will perhaps retry the conversion in lightzone itself as you can do even more fine-tuning there.

Asher Kelman said:

I do have a nagging question on the dgree of sharpening. The image does have a great architectural sharpness to it, but is it perhaps a little much on the background tree to skyline interface. Or else, is it that this is the outcome of the rolloff in your selection for tone mapping in Lightzone?

Click to expand...

The sharpness may, first of all, result of my 2.8/28-75D Minolta lens, which is really amazing, especially regarding the ridiculously low price. I only applied very modest sharpening in lightzone, but - as I just re-checked - the region for sharpening included the background with the hills. So there is room for improvement, and I will work on this image again.

Asher Kelman said:

I hope you might start a separate thread on geomapping, to explain what you do to keep tack of each image's geo-location.

Click to expand...

Will gladly do so in the course of next week. In short, the base recipe is simple: A small Sony CS-1 gps tracker, a self-written script to automatically write the coordinates into every image, and digikam as software to always show the map with the location together with the picture.

So again thanks for the warm welcome

Markus