Chateau de Chinon

[jools-elliott]

Morning all

Here is a long exposure I did a while back at Chinon. A Lee Filters 10 stop ND was used to lengthen the exposure and I held back the sky with the filter pouch instead of a grad.

You can see a slight colour cast on it. I had to open it up a little in Lightroom. But this is one exposure, one photo and no blending. Pure photographic technique

And if anyone is interested, I've started adding workshops to my schedule. Going to run two in Dorset during October as a pre-cursor to the full blown ones in 2012.

Jools

[Cathus]

I thought this was going to be a shot of a camera company's warehouse, I remember having a couple of Chinon lenses in my old film days.

Nice reflection in the sand, I'd maybe crop a bit of sky so the horizontal break wasnt right in the middle of the frame and maybe slightly brighten the image in levels.

[jools-elliott]

Thanks Cathus.

The sand is in the river Vienne although when the waters are low it is quite sandy on the river banks.

I was pleased with exposure especially given how unpredictable the results can be. I want to look more into the technique and devise a fool-proof way of doing it.

[jimmyosram]

I have to agree with Cathus. Although you visit great locations, your photos seem to always appear dull (low contrast/mid tone/brightness). I do appreciate that you are indeed happy with your exposure, but you post your images to have critique and perhaps it might be worth looking at this again?

[jools-elliott]

Hi Jimmy.

You know, I do appreciate comments.

Jimmy, I've said it before. I think you are relying too much on post processing to give life to your images. There is a fine balance between processing it and the PROCESSING it.

As well, the image has come out of the camera as RAW. Gone to 16bit TIFF Adobe RGB and then to 8bit 72dpi SRGB.

The conversion plus coupled with web browsers will strip it of any life.

I looked at an image that you did on a beach and a great sky. The image itself was great but then you processed it with a plugin of some kind and for me, it killed it.

[jimmyosram]

Hang on Jools, we're not talking about my images here. If you have comments to make on images I post you are very welcome to comment on them in their own thread. We're talking about your images here.

Clearly you don't agree with my comments, and that's fine, it's your image. They're only opinions.

You also obviously don't like to be critiqued by me so I'll withhold my opinions from now on.

[jools-elliott]

Jimmy, I don't want to be at odds with you. But did you read what I put in my reply as to why the image is like it is?

Do you want to see the original un-edited image? Then you'll see lifeless.

[markgozz]

Hi Jools

I don't want to get in the middle of anything here but I would like to understand what your limits are on image manipulation .
You admit that you do do some post processing and that you use filters to enhance the scene just like most of the other photographers on this site and yet you feel that yours is the correct amount and others are pushing it to far .
I understand that you want to perfect in camera only techniques but isn't it the aim of most photographers to show the scene their shooting off to it's best and if that includes adjustments to levels and contrast and the like then that's all part of digital photography .
Taken to the extreme you would shoot in raw with no filters of any kind and convert with even the default settings turned off , are today's camera's capable of doing this and delivering beautifully balanced images ?

Mark

[jools-elliott]

Morning Mark.

My limits are that it has to look realistic and not overcooked. I still work with film and I am ideally trying to emulate that with my digital.

Out in the field, I still use a spot meter as I feel the discipline is good. You might ask why when the digital has a histogram. Well, my film camera is a Hasselblad which is loaded with Velvia. If you've ever used it, you'll know how unforgiving it is. However, you get it right and the slide is beautiful and will outstrip digital by a long way.

As mentioned in the original posting of this the only filter used was a ND one. The sky was "burnt" in with a filter pouch. In the landscape, I have done images using just my hand or a filter pouch to burn in the sky and no filtration. So, in essence everything was under my control.

What I don't do in Photoshop is add on lots of plugins etc. Someone asked me on another forum if I had used some plugin on an image that I did. The answer was no. It had been processed gently in LR and PS along with the natural light of the day.

The digital cameras of today just won't give us what we want unless there has been some manipulation. They are just too flat.

As I said. I can post up the original image with no manipulation at all so you can how it cleaned up.

Lastly, someone on another forum has said "I love your images but you are overprocessing them". So even I get charged with it!

[ianpinion]

Hi Jools,

How we edit an image should be determined by just one criteria and that is simply how does the photographer perceive their final image to look. If you want the image to look like an accurate description of whatever scene you're photographing, at the time of capture, then very little editing should be required to achieve that. However, if you wanting it to look more impressionistic then it will be subjected to a lot more editing to achieve that look.

Finally, if you're captuing in RAW, your image will look flat until you start to edit it and the harder you push the curves and levels the more processed it will look. I have to say that certain images do not need to look really contrasty, but others will always look better with more contrast. The actual criteria changes for each shot, but the definition remains the same, it's how we want the image to look and how we want to present it to our audience.