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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
11-15-2021, 12:02 PM
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Wow!
Nice shot and such fertile ground for future photographs of the cycles of seasons, times of day (or night), and diverse weather conditions. I'd imagine the scene could be quite interesting under conditions such as a full moon (lit scenery with dark starry skies), with the first buds/flowers of spring, in snow, or with a flaming sky of sunrise/sunset.
Perhaps a polyptych of seasons or times could fill a wall with the timelessness of the passing of time. And it need not be the standard winter-spring-summer-autumn sequence. It could be a black-to-white series (from a dark moonlit leafless scene to sunrise spring to noon day foliage to snow-covered) or a monochrome-to-color series (from snow to the saturated colors of post-rain spring foliage).
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
03-09-2021, 05:37 PM
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Fantastic images, as always, Ed!
I love the first one! The lefthand foreground grass beautifully balances the righthand mid-ground loch with the image edges implying the continuation of grass to the left and lake to the right. The hint of shadow in the lower-right lends the impression of just arriving from a darker area to see this view. It really feels like you could walk down to that rocky promontory to see more of the loch. I like that the background's layering of hills and scale -- they fill 1/3 to 1/2 the frame height which makes them look quite large and grand. The dark shadow in the distant right hill (and colors of the vegetation) hint at impending sunset and autumn.
The second one feels a bit closed-in to me (maybe it feels different in wall-print size). The dark line of shadow behind the foreground grass seems like an obstacle and the foreground hillock on the right makes the loch look like a pond that ends within the frame. Unlike the first image, it's not easy to tell there's the viewpoint promontory or whether it's possible to walk further or see more beyond the shadow line. Cropping perhaps half the foreground grass and perhaps half the sky might create a much stronger ultra-wide landscape with four or five narrow layers of features. Of course, it might feel very different in a wall-size print in which the grass is near the viewer's feet and the shadow line is below waist height on the wall.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
08-19-2020, 08:56 AM
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I liked your bluer-than-blue skies but am familiar with the problem of polarizers and some skies.
Up at 14,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains, a polarizer can turn the sky a very unnatural blue-black if the atmospheric conditions are right (or wrong depending on how you look at it). I'd imagine it's an issue with some high mountain skies in different parts of the world that have little humidity or dust to scatter sunlight.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
08-12-2020, 08:31 AM
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Nice image!
In this world of strife, it's great to see someone giving peas a chance! ;)
Perhaps the follow-on picture can help everyone visualize whirled peas. :lol:
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
05-29-2020, 08:46 AM
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This is caused by having lenses that are too perfect!
As an object in a scene, a star is a perfect pinpoint of light. A high-quality lens can readily image a star as single or a couple of pixels. If the exposure setting is picked to bring out the fainter stars of the sky and milky way, the brightest stars will saturate the pixels and clip. All the bright stars will be the same 100% brightness which means the image loses some of the sense of constellations of varing-brightness stars against a dim star backdrop. (Post processing to bring up the dimmer sky features exacerbates this, too.)
In contrast, the reflected star will inevitably be a bit blurred by micro-motions of the water, cover several pixels of the sensor, and thus register as a range of brighter-bigger and dimmer-smaller features.
(Note: the Kepler space telescope -- SPEX - About Kepler -- intentionally defocused its image to avoid these effects and collect better data.)
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
04-10-2020, 05:34 AM
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One issue with shift lenses is that they generally don't meter accurately when shifted. So the exposure needs to be set with the lens in the unshifted position.
The other issue with shift lenses is that it's easy to forget to slide the second aperture ring closed when metering and shooting between times when you've slid it open for focusing and composing.
My personal workflow for this is:- Unshift the lens
- Close the aperture
- Meter the scene
- Open the aperture
- Focus on the scene
- Shift/recompose the scene
- Check the focus
- Close the aperture
- Shoot
It sounds like a lot of instructions but after some practice is becomes second nature.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
10-01-2019, 07:11 AM
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Good idea & great image!
Your process also explains how you moved Polaris to the west. ;)
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
06-24-2019, 06:38 AM
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A slight breeze will distort the peaks and troughs of the otherwise sinusoidal water waves, canting them slightly from perfect horizontals.
Variations in the wind levels across the surface of the water, variations in reach (the length of open water over which the wind operates) and variations in the camera's perspective (looking down on the foreground waves but straight across the tops of the farther waves) also affects these kinds of reflections.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
03-20-2019, 09:35 AM
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Nice photos and cool scenery!
That's the kind of scenery that begs revisiting and can ultimately lead to some awesome images.
That little "bonsai" tree on the right is screaming for a moon-nestled-in-tree image or some other composition combining the moon & tree at similar scale. With a fullish moon it would be like a lunar scoop of ice cream on a tree-cup. Or get closer to the tree and make the moon look like an egg in a nest. Shooting a pre-dawn moonrise and some days before a new moon might get an awesome crescent moon that echos the shape of the tree. (You'll probably want the K-1 for the crescent moon because you'll need a pretty high ISO to stop the moon's motion plus you might need to stop-down a bit to get both the tree and moon with the DoF.)
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
10-16-2018, 07:40 AM
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Absolutely! A well-designed demosaicing algorithm will estimate the full-resolution luminance pattern implied by pixel-to-pixel variations in all three color bands to fill-in the missing patterns in each color band.
But if the photo is taken with a strong red filter on the lens, then there will be very little signal and detail in the green and blue pixel channels and little ability to estimate the red-channel details that fell on green and blue pixels.
Thus, it's probably better to shoot in full color with no filter and then post-process with the channel mixer to convert the RGB image into a color-filtered monochrome. The only exception is that channel mixing cannot exactly replicate all the spectral effects of a color filter on the lens. For example, a picture taken through an orange filter might be subtly different from a unfiltered color image mixed in post to simulate an orange filter. A true orange glass filter might provide stronger green versus yellow contrast than the unfiltered+post-processing can version offers.
Post-processing of the unfiltered RGB image might be good enough to create the desired effect. Yet some photographers might seek a truer color filtration that only a color filter can provide.
Note: for those who have (and can use) pixelshift, the results with a color filter will be at full resolution.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
10-15-2018, 09:31 AM
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A strong red (or blue) filter kills the resolution of any Bayer filter digital camera. It turns the 40 MpIx RGB sensor of the 645D into a 10 MPix monochrome sensor. (Green filters only kill about half the pixels)
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
06-27-2018, 09:31 AM
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Nice!
The angled lines of both trunks and shadows is mesmerizing.
The balancing of bright green canopy with bright green foreground creates nice balance.
And the receding pattern of more and more tree trunks builds incredible depth.
I feel like I could step into this forest and soon be lost in it.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
04-19-2018, 03:13 PM
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Wow, Mike!
I just rewatched three of the Alien movies and your image is going to give me nightmares!
Amazing composition, lighting, color, and ambience!
So stunningly immersive, I feel like I'm on an alien planet.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
04-13-2018, 08:40 AM
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I learned this from designing high-resolution, large-format film scanners back in the late 1980s. Most of this stuff is just turning the crank on some geometry and algebra.
These days, wikipedia is a rich resource on this stuff. But it still requires some mental noodling to see what a given math formula means to a photographer who sees a cool picture taken with one format of camera and wishes to replicate that image or that look with their own different format camera. And it does not help that the ways that lenses are speced in mm of focal length and relative aperture can make some photographic calculations easy but make other ones hard.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
04-13-2018, 07:36 AM
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This is exactly true. The optical refraction of light, the convergence of the rays behind the lens, and any blur if the film or sensor aren't at the exact point of focus is only a function of the focal length and the various distances from subjects to lens to focal plane. The width and height of the film or sensor have no influence on the size of the circle of confusion. The lens does not know how big the film or sensor is.
But that has nothing to do with equivalence (except to create a lot of arguments about using the same focal length lens on different formats zooming with the feet etc.).
The effects of equivalence arise when one wants to take truly equivalent images in two different formats.
Imagine I see some beautiful 16x20 image taken on a 6x7 with a wide-open 105/2.4 and I want to make the equivalent 16x20 image (with identical foreground-subject-background perspective, identical framing, and identical blurring of out-of-focus regions) but using a K-3.
1) To get the identical foreground-subject-background perspective, I need to put the K-3 in the same location as the 6x7 was in with all the various lens-to-subject distances being the same.
2) To get the identical framing, I can't use a 105 on the K-3 because it's too narrow. I need to use a 30 mm lens on the K-3 (30 = 105 * 16mm APSC_frame_height / 56mm 6x7_frame_height ) to get the equivalent angle of view for getting the equivalent framing.
3) To get the identical blurring of out-of-focus regions with a 30 mm lens on APS-C as a 105/2.4 produces on 6x7, a messy bit of math reveals that I need a 30 f/0.7. (The reason for this is due to the smaller optical magnification of a 30 mm lens on APS-C and the effects of having a smaller circle of confusion on APS-C. That forces me to need a physical aperture on the 30 mm lens as big as the physical aperture on the 105/2.4. That's a 44 mm diameter physical aperture which then is equal to a f/0.7 relative aperture on a 30 mm lens. The overall result is that the ratio of the format sizes determines the ratio of relative apertures needed and that 105/2.4 on 6x7 is actually a very shallow DoF lens compared to a 30/2.4 on APS-C.)
Equivalence is about attempting to make equivalent images on different formats and has nothing to do with the same lens or focal length looks on different formats.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
03-09-2018, 11:56 AM
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Whoa!
Nominated for "Best Use of a Medium Format Camera for Traffic Accident Reporting"!
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
09-02-2017, 10:34 AM
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Beautiful and very interesting!
I think the effect of the birds is wonderful and if I were you, I would go back to the lighthouse to try different treatments of it. In particular, I'd work on increasing the size and definition of the bird trail zone. One minor dissonance in this image is that the large, brightly-lit, strongly-structured building is "looking left" whilst the more subtle and intriguing bird-trail zone is obscured behind the lighthouse and facing right.
I'd try moving the camera toward the right and a bit closer to the building which might better balance the building facade vs. light-fan-with-birds. I'd also try a portrait-oriented shot maybe with the front facade in the lower-left of the frame, the light-fan-with-birds in the upper-right, and the lighthouse cylinder bisecting the frame in the center. Of course, I could be horribly wrong, so the grain-of-salt, two-cents rule applies!
I do like your use of wide-angle here because it brings in more stars, provides a nice curvature of their motion, and adds a bit of keystoning to the lighthouse which accentuates the sense of height and scale of the tower.
Excellent image and an intriguing effect overall!
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
03-06-2017, 03:34 PM
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Palmed it off on someone else! ;)
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
02-25-2017, 07:38 PM
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Mike! Wow! Another awesome one. I really like:
* the yin-yang curve of land and sea
* how the vanishing point of the bridge and those yellow flowers point to the sunset
* the timing of the waves on the beach
* the juxtaposition of the bridge arch & sea arch
* the voyeuristic PoV of the gap in the hillside vegetation
Overall , it feels like an intimate living room scene with all the natural elements of land and sea talking with each other around the hearth of the sunset.
P.S. 62 images! and 20,986 x 8252 pixels!!!!!! WHOA!
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
01-30-2017, 11:21 AM
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Although one could use the flash in that way, sometimes shorter is not better.
One of the nice aspects of this image is that the length of the blurred micro-drops is similar to the width of the rim of the splash crater. It nicely conveys the motion of the spray without blurring the crater. By explicitly controlling exposure time with the shutter, the length of the spray blur is optimized.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
01-22-2017, 08:34 AM
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To me, a photograph like this epitomizes what a great photographer can do.
There are photographs that are great because the subject matter is great and there are photographs that are great because the photographer is great. This image belongs to the latter category!
Most people who have walked by this rock outcrop never gave it a second glance. Probably, no one has ever photographed it before (the exception might be a snapshot of a rambunctious child standing atop the rock or a beloved dog sniffing at the base). It's not the classical dramatic scene of deep valleys, massive mountains, majestic trees, bright fields of wildflowers, or impressive animals that dominated so much of landscape photography. It's just an ordinary rock in a plain field of grass, in front of the some every-day trees.
Yet the image works and works extremely well on so many levels. The elements of this image that I like are:
* the perfect distances between the frame edge and objects;
* the slightly OOF background;
* the bias of the rock to the right of the frame with the sweep of the grass to the left;
* the dark-bright-dark-bright alternation of layers in the scene;
* the bent-linear gap in the branches in the center that seems to lead to the flower-like bright patch of the sun;
* the juxtaposition of sepia-brown cloud and spring-green grass; and
* the parallel angles of the weed stalks with the foreground rock surfaces the 50-50 split of ground & sky.
Excellent work!
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
01-10-2017, 06:59 AM
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I've played with this on the K-1 a little and noticed this:
"Interval composite average" does a nice job on moving water and street scenes as long as there's enough frames to avoid it looking like a simple double-exposure. The only caution is that over-exposed objects on a dark background (e.g., bright white water droplets at a fountain or waterfall) turn into strange uniform-gray spots which might look stupid or surreal depending on one's goals.
"Interval composite bright" looks like an interesting way to do star trail and meteor shower images (keep the time between frames short to avoid dashed lines) but does a bad job of street scenes (a person with a light-colored top and dark pants becomes a floating torso) and white water (the scene simply fills in with nothing but bright water).
I've not tried "Interval composite sum" but assume it's effects would be somewhere between "average" and "bright".
It's definitely a useful feature in the time-lapse photographers tool chest.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
11-16-2016, 10:20 AM
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Here's more than almost anyone would want to know about the geology of the Elk Mountains:
Elk Mountains |
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
11-08-2016, 02:48 PM
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Thanks for the explanation.
It sounds like you have a double case of landscape photographer's itch -- the itch to go out there and the itch from having gone out there.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
11-08-2016, 01:42 PM
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WOW! I can feel the glow even at web-size. That needs to be printed HUGE on transparency/glass and the backlit by giant lightbox.
Did you use a polarizer to enhance the reflections or did you brighten them in post?
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