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Autumn colors

Hi folks,

What? No Autumn colors to share?

I'll kick off, looking forward to your contributions:

Autumn1739.jpg


Image uncropped, added a bit of a vignette to focus attention on the trees.

Have fun,
Bart
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Hi folks,

What? No Autumn colors to share?

I'll kick off, looking forward to your contributions:

Autumn1739.jpg


Image uncropped, added a bit of a vignette to focus attention on the trees.

Have fun,
Bart
Hi Bart,

There was another thread by Ron here, and yet another one by Lorenz here earlier today. But we have to have even more, I agree with you fully. :)

What strikes me first in this image is the crispness of it. I am assuming that you've shot it with your 1ds Mk II using some serious glass, didn't you? Also knowing your skills in sharpening, the picture must have been sharpened in the best possible fashion. The end result is technical excellence.

Composition wise, this is a simple but a very stable composition. I see two triangles standing on a common base, the smaller one on the left hand side formed by the red leaved tree. The trees manage to hold attention.

But the main power of the picture is -of course- the color of it. This one would not go well in B&W ;-)

Cheers,
 
Hi Bart,

There was another thread by Ron here, and yet another one by Lorenz here earlier today. But we have to have even more, I agree with you fully. :)

I just saw Ron's thread ! Had I seen it earlier, I wouldn't have started a new thread, just added to it. Maybe the threads can be merged into a color fiesta. Lorenz's image is a real beauty. I just hadn't read all of the posts yet, I've been too busy, too little time, but had been wanting to post mine for some time.

What strikes me first in this image is the crispness of it. I am assuming that you've shot it with your 1ds Mk II using some serious glass, didn't you? Also knowing your skills in sharpening, the picture must have been sharpened in the best possible fashion. The end result is technical excellence.

Thanks, you're right about the 1Ds2, with a TS-E 45mm f/2.8 to control the focal plane. However, at this size any camera should be able to produce such crispness. I used FocusMagic on a Luminosity blended sharpening layer to revive the downsampled image, just a quicky on default settings. The crispness also attempts to convey the colder air and brittle leafs and branches that are characteristic of the season.

Composition wise, this is a simple but a very stable composition. I see two triangles standing on a common base, the smaller one on the left hand side formed by the red leaved tree. The trees manage to hold attention.

Yep. It's based on (many) triangles, suggesting stability/rest. It also uses the color contrast to accentuate foreground and background differences, depth, with the emphasis on the lower left (where the eye should begin, and return). I added a subtle vignette to reduce the risk of the eye being drawn out of the image by the bright sky.

But the main power of the picture is -of course- the color of it. This one would not go well in B&W ;-)

LOL. Well, capturing 'autumn/fall' in a B&W is quite a challenge, although I'd welcome contributions that attempt to do just that. Yet, I'm glad that the setting sun helped my image.

Bart
 
FallapaloozA!

LOL. Well, capturing 'autumn/fall' in a B&W is quite a challenge, although I'd welcome contributions that attempt to do just that. Yet, I'm glad that the setting sun helped my image.

Well, except for this first image, which might be a candidate for a B&W fall image, I finally welcome a reason to crank up the saturation on my images!!! =D

We went north to Traverse City over the weekend...

fall2008-1.jpg


fall2008-2.jpg


fall2008-3.jpg


fall2008-4.jpg
 

Michael Fontana

pro member
Some autumn colors, too, maybe a bit different than Bart thought:

zoomify

Due to server bandwith, I' ll leave it for a day, or so.
It's a 21-image-stitch, with the Planar 50/Contax.
 

Michael Fontana

pro member
Edward

zoomifying these panos is IMHO the best way to show'em on screen; they wouldn't really work as a lets say 1000 pix-image.


Bonjour Nicolas

right, it was a bit cold ;-)
the mountain hasn't sun for about 4 monthes/year, so even in August, there's some snow on it.

I'd have liked to have stitched that image, from the first day :

snow.jpg


But wenn coming up, we were late, as we had to carry the equipement through the snow, (and I was at a party the night before) so there wasn't enough time to set up the panohead and capture all 21 shots.

Anyway, it's a mid-therm project, so some 4 - 5 other characters of that mountain will follow through the next years, the wall being a strong vis - a - vis to the humain. All will be stitched for huge, high-rez (print) output.
 
How much attention do you have to pay to moving elements, such as distinct cloud formations? It appears that probably wasn't too much of a concern for this image, but is it something you think about in other situations and are there any "better" strategies for dealing with them?
 

Michael Fontana

pro member
You' re right, Edward

for the zoomify, moving clouds weren't a big problem.
But for the summer panos - with the fast moving haze, it was quite different.


So here's what can be done, and that's one reason I like PTGui, with its manual adjustements:

- deleting manually the CP (Controll Points) in the cloud area. This will stop the other image parths to become distorted.

- if this is still not giving good results, the pano might be rendered as a multilayer file, with each frame as a single layer. Adding a layer mask in PS will result in a smooth and quick correction.
 

janet Smith

pro member
A bit of Autumn colour from Yorkshire

IMG_0025cleanSS001.jpg


Kniphofia, almost dead, but the bees/wasps still love them


IMG_0045cleanJS.jpg

I love to be under trees looking up into the canopy, wish you could smell the grass and leaves and fresh air, funny some photographs bring the fragrance back to me.....
 
Beautiful photos of a beautiful time of year.

104111577.jpg


A footbridge over a canyon near the Illinois River in North Central Illinois, taken a couple of weeks ago when the leaves were just getting the notion to turn.
 
A footbridge over a canyon near the Illinois River in North Central Illinois, taken a couple of weeks ago when the leaves were just getting the notion to turn.

Hi Tom,

That's a nice image. May I suggest 2 things to try.

1. This image is a nice example of the hugely different effect it scores when just flipping it horizontally. Personally I like it better when flipped (maybe that says something about me
wink.gif
).
2. You might want to experiment a bit with a very large radius USM technique, to add some more 'depth' in the darker areas.

Bart
 
Thank you Bart,

I don't think I've ever flipped an image. It would seem that a mirror image (flipped, if I understand correctly) would have the same strengths or weaknesses as the original, but the idea is an interesting one. I will certainly explore this possibility.

The large radius USM technique to increase global contrast was used with this image after resizing for the web, but I almost always use too little strength for fear of overdoing the effect. Your observation regarding its use in this photo is on the money.

Also thanks for your recent comments and advice regarding how to downsize an image. Much food for thought and much inspiration for experimentation.

Regards,

Tom
 
Very Large Radius USM Technique? To add depth to darker areas? How is it that I've never heard of this before? :)

Intuitively, I understand the concept. Are there any details to it?
 

JohnZeman

New member
This is what it looked like about 2 weeks ago near Copper Harbor Michigan (up near the end of the Keweenaw Peninsula).

While I did enhance them a bit in Lightroom the colors really were that intense up there. To the point where it almost hurt the eyes to look at them on that rainy day.

2008-1008-115928.jpg
 
Very Large Radius USM Technique? To add depth to darker areas? How is it that I've never heard of this before? :)

Intuitively, I understand the concept. Are there any details to it?

Okay, rather than using the Unsharp Masking filter (USM) in an application like Photoshop or similar to sharpen the edges in an image, you can use a very large e.g. 50-100 radius and a low amount of 10-30. This tends to enhance general local contrast without noticable halo. The best values vary with image size and personal preference.

This concept can be enhanced by applying this on a duplicate (luminosity blending) layer, even with advanced blend-if settings to avoid clipping. I generally start with splitting the Black- and White points of the lower layer of the Blend-if dialog to 0-127 and 128-255, and tweak from there.

Bart
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Here's my contribution

Hi Bart,

Finally I can share some. After I got my camera back, today was the first opportunity to go out and shoot some. So here's what I could come up with, I hope you'll like it. C&C welcome as usual.

autumn4.jpg


autumn3.jpg
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Well, except for this first image, which might be a candidate for a B&W fall image, I finally welcome a reason to crank up the saturation on my images!!! =D

We went north to Traverse City over the weekend...

fall2008-1.jpg


fall2008-4.jpg

Hi Ed,

"Very nice pictures" I have been wanting to say for a few days and then I got distracted. Better late than never, eh? The first one is special indeed. Did you do a B&W version of it?
But of all 4, I like the last one the most. Great composition, color wise as well as structurally.

Cheers,
 

janet Smith

pro member
Janet,

Can you show off the busy bee a little more?

Asher

Hi Asher

IMG_AsherV1.jpg


Thank you very much for sending this through to me, I like what you've done very much, I'm going to go back to the original file and work on it some more, I have lots of similar ones, the air was absolutely buzzing with loads of small bees and hornets, intent on getting the last of the nectar from these plants, I managed to get several with the bees nice and sharp mid flight, I'll try and get time to work on some more of them perhaps later today, or over the weekend. Many thanks for your time, input and ideas, as always very much appreciated......
 

Alain Briot

pro member
One from this past week. We were there at the peak of the end of the fall color for that area :)

Sierra-Fall.jpg


P45 on Hasselblad V. Multiple frame collage with extensive color enhancement work.
 
Thanks for the feedback Cem - I was pleased with my thought process on the color and structural composition in #4 and I value your affirmation.

I tried a B&W conversion and struggled with the tonality. Here, I gave it another try:

fall2008-5.jpg


I put a graduated neutral density filter (LR2) on sky/horizon and was happier with it...

Ed.
 
Last edited:

janet Smith

pro member
I don't think I have ever seen such intense Autumn colouring as in this beautiful Acer with it's feathery leaves. Hope you like it.....

IMG_0109SSJS.jpg

 

janet Smith

pro member
I think that is a really neat picture Janet.

Hi Ron

Thank you for commenting, I found it difficult to get an interesting shot out of the blaze of colour, it can easily become just one big mass of colour, it was very breezy so it was challenging, glad you like it....
 
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