I see Mo beat me to posting his Salt River Gallery photos . I went with him, and this was the first time I really got to use my new K110D. I'd also appreciate critiques on these select shots. The gallery will be going up within a couple of days.

In comparison, my shots aren't nearly as sharp as Mo's, especially the vertically-oriented shots of the river. I don't know, maybe it's the SR, or maybe it's just me .

I also decided to leave these photos unedited. Although they were not RAW shots, they are all free from all post-processing. It's tempting to apply at least auto-levels, but I'd like to know whether these photos can truly benefit from editing. I had some unfortunate vignetting with the kit lens (18-55mm).

Anyway, here are the shots (don't know what the EXIF conventions are):

smc Pentax-DA 12-24mm F4.0


smc Pentax-DA 18-55mm F3.5-5.6


smc Pentax-DA 18-55mm F3.5-5.6

[Adam]

In comparison, my shots aren't nearly as sharp as Mo's, especially the vertically-oriented shots of the river. I don't know, maybe it's the SR, or maybe it's just me .



I also decided to leave these photos unedited. Although they were not RAW shots, they are all free from all post-processing. It's tempting to apply at least auto-levels, but I'd like to know whether these photos can truly benefit from editing. I had some unfortunate vignetting with the kit lens (18-55mm).

I had the SR off for most of the landscape shots, but consider the 10mp and the lenses...

The vignetting is quite obvious in the last shot. The lighting's great for an unedited shot, though. My 24/35mm shots received little or no editing, but the DA and FA zooms' colors needed to be corrected, unfortunately. Tit for tat.

I'll be looking forward to your full gallery.

Now it's time to go out on pinnacle peak and capture the new year's skyline (fireworks ).

Also, when I ged my 645 shots developed (I still have 5 left), I won't forget to post them!

[Rak]

Very true. I'll be sure to pick up a wide-angle prime before heading off to vacation this summer. I'm still sorting through the pictures; the gallery will be up on the 2nd at the latest. I'm looking forward to the 645 photos.

Also, I figured out why the same shutter speed/aperture combinations were not producing similar photos -- it was the ISO setting. Mine starts at 200, whereas yours starts at 100.

[roentarre]

hi Rak. I like your first shot and 3rd shot.

A bit of cropping might help.

1st pic - crop the bottom 1/4 off. It might look more dramatic

3rd pic - crop the sky off even though I see the tiny moon there. But I am paying more attention to the snow and the geometrical pattern at the lower proportion of the photo

Great images. Looking forward to your gallery too

[Rak]

For the first photo, I think I'm going to focus on the bridge, cropping the photo but maintaining the aspect ratio. I'd like to maintain the aspect ratio for the bottom photo as well, but I'll see what I can do there.

[Rak]

After much delay, I finally have the gallery up. From 200 photos, 43 are still on my harddrive, and 25 of those made it to the web: Salt River Canyon -- Arizona, December 2006.

Unfortunately, the 3:2 aspect makes these pictures even smaller (640x426), so I'm thinking of making a liquid-layout gallery, similar to what Mo has on mosphotos.com, but more integrated with the main site. The pictures will then be 800 or even 1024 pixels wide.

[Ole]

Hi Rak,
You have some fine shots in your gallery. A few could benefit from some sharpening. You can either crank up sharpness in the camera, or do it when post processing. That's just the nature of the beast, and has nothing to do with the shapness of the lens. You can also remove the vigneting of the 18-55mm during postprocessing.

[Rak]

Thanks for the feedback. Coincidentally, I actually tried post-processing with a 3x3 matrix today, in Xara X. My dad and I entered a the values of a certain sharpness filter, then modified them. On a sample shot, I drastically increased the sharpness with only minimal distortion.

At 640x426 (maximum size for attachments), increasing the sharpness actually distorted the picture, but at 3008x2000, it made an incredible difference. I posted them at 1024x681, where the change is marginally visible. If you download them and view them sequentially, the difference is immediately noticeable -- the original looks far more blurry than if it was viewed alone.

The original:


Edited:


This is the matrix I used:

Code:

 0   -1    0
-1    5   -1
 0   -1    0

As for the vignetting, would I manually apply the sky over the corners, or is there a special filter I should use? Also, is there a way to reduce vignetting from the source with a lens filter or similar device?