Off-Topic - advice, experiences and examples, for images that will be processed in PhotoLab

A beautifully crisp image without being over sharpened. I really like tit very much.

Mark

I just found this fascinating (to me) link to photographs, by women, in the 1880’s…

https://www.messynessychic.com/2023/02/10/the-mysterious-viscountess-who-photographed-the-unseen-sensuality-of-victorians/

I wonder how they learned photography - trial and error?
I wonder what cameras they used?
One of my favorites:

I enjoy the style, and the sepia toning. I wonder if that’s how photos looked back then, or if the toning was done later?

To @George, the more I look at your photo, the more I like it. The shadows are fascinating, as is the “perspective” with all the lines converging onto the center of the photo. Much of the photo looks “old”, but the van brings it right up to the present. England?

Amsterdam. (Netherlands)

Can’t be England: right hand traffic.

George

1 Like

Last week I was at an opening of a photo exhibition of a black southafrican photographer Ernst Cole. Being a black southafrican he documented the apartheids policy in a way a white southafrican wasn’t able to do .

If you’re interested in documentary photography this is a rather good article.

George

I think he may have thought “England” because of the quote in English, by Benjamin Disraeli, who was the British Prime Minister during the 1870s.

Mark

I just noticed a different behaviour concerning the presets with optical corrections. There’s no automatic correction based on keystoning. See my image. This is in all of the presets except dxo standard. I’m on 6.3.1 now.

George

for bikes they don’t have any left or right hand traffic preference in Amsterdam :rofl:
just the shortest path!

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Yes, I know. My daughter lives in Haarlem and when I’m there I always get confused because people obey the traffic lights. :grin: Only 20km away.

George

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Yes, those new speed bikes are deadly in Amsterdam. They drive like they have a scooter but no sound so no warning by ear.
I drive a car with companyname on it so they know i drive forward when i have green light, just beeb the horn and hit the gas…
But on foot watch out for those 25km/u or faster driving maniacs even on the greenlight for pedestrian crossing they just don’t slow down.
I use my toolcase on wheels to protect me.
Smack that in front of me, just before i start walking.

Well, there were very few settings - the aperture tended to be determined by a disk with a fixed size hole and the exposure time was anything from 20 secs to 5 minutes, so hardly precise. Wet plate collodion tends to have an iSO of 5. So, there’s not really too much to learn and a few tests could confirm the best exposure for virtually every photo taken thereafter.

They would possibly have used either a sliding box camera or a box camera with a short bellows.

Once the glass plate has been exposed and developed, you end up with a reversed image on the glass plate, which was then usually reversed into an albumen print.

She often used a mirror, which is an interesting way of providing a reversed (right way round) image of the subject.

There’s an amazing modern day wet plate photographer Shane Balkowitsch Wet Plate Collodion Ambrotype Photography well worth a visit to his site

Yes!
I never even thought about right-hand-drive vs. left. Nice image! I was just guessing.

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Hi Folks,

Hope all is well with you!

Been experimenting with some setting and post-processing.
Might not be every ones taste but feel free in commenting (Am no day to day DPL (6.3.1 - 134) user but still learning.

Former Soesterberg AB (32TFS till 1994), the Netherlands. A frontal shot of a very torn & worn MIG21 " Fishbed".
IMG_8191.CR2 (28,3 MB)
IMG_8191.CR2.dop (9,9 KB)

Yeah, I kinda love late 60’s fighter jets. :slight_smile:

Regards,
Jeroen

2 Likes

I am curious as to why you set the midtones to -100.

Mark

Hello Mark!

Hope you’re doing well.

Citaat
Not quite sure as to why I introduced midtones to -100.
Seems to flatted out colors a bit, also making the lighter background darker with more structure. I.e., more ‘present’? Be informed, I played a bit with those settings to see outcome on sch selection.
Your question s in relation to an incorrect setting? Should I change this as so the outcome could be better? Any ideas and/or advise reamain welcome by me Mark!

Jeroen

If that is what you wanted, and it allowed you to meet your goal for this image, then its not incorrect. However, in my experience setting the mid-tones to minus 100 is unusual and it is not a setting I would have chosen for this image.

Mark

This made a strong impression. As well as documenting the deep injustice of the apartheid regime, the images are also technically very good. Definitely a recommended article to watch.

My first thought on looking at your photo, is it might have been more effective if the camera was sitting literally on the ground, so most of the. plane would be highlighted against the sky. I don’t know if that would have worked, and if I did it, I think I would struggle to stand back up again. Did you take photos from other angles too? I apologize, as I’m t trying to see more of the details, rather than appreciate the overall photo, but the things I’m looking at are too dark.

My version:
IMG_8191.CR2.dop (14.8 KB)

I haven’t taken any photos in weeks - been too busy with my dry-firing and range visits. I guess I need to take a break from that, and dust off my camera gear.

I’m glad at least one did read that link. :grin:
The article also discusses what a good photographer must meet, what qualifications he must have.
If you’re interested you should buy his book ‘House of Bondage’, just republished.

George

It’s been a while since I was active here. I guess I was feeling a little “down” because the types of images I was interested in didn’t excite many of you. I think I have learned enough about PhotoLab that maybe I can just “use it” rather than trying to learn more about it - although there is a LOT that I have left to learn. Then I got very involved in my Bullseye Shooting, which ate up a lot of time.

I also started to miss the discussions we had here. I always enjoyed them, for many reasons. That led to getting re-interested in taking photos, likely of the old and “famous” sections of Miami Beach, the landmarks that Miami Beach is famous for, but about that time, some goofball drove his giant Chevy Suburban into the back of my tiny Mazda while I was stopped waiting for traffic to move again. So, my Miata is in the shop, and there is a chance I’ll get it back in two weeks, maybe.

Earlier today, I went looking around for fairly recent images that I hadn’t really investigated too much, and found several of an interesting sunset scene over Biscayne Bay. I guess that’s the last thing that anyone here wants to see, but it looked to me like a fun image to work with. I tried to do it in B&W, but it was lacking something, so I turned the color faucet back on. (I think I tried to edit it months ago, but gave up on it.)

If anyone’s about to shoot me for yet another Miami Sunset Photo, go ahead. If nothing else, it got what’s left of my creative juices flowing again. My D780 is all set to go at a moment’s notice, and ditto for my M10. A couple of months ago, I sent my M8.2 in to Leica to have them map out some bad pixels - and they took the opportunity to make the whole camera “like new”, even as far as replacing the leather, er, vulcanite. I just got it back from the repair shop two days ago. If I start to use that camera for creative work, @Joanna will dump all over me, as I’ve got better tools, but I enjoy using my old cameras, and I think the whole reason I do photography is because I enjoy it. Given an assignment, if I ever get one again, I’ll use the best camera for whatever I’m trying to do.

I’m surprised nobody commented, for better or worse, over my version of the jet fighter plane up above, with more of the details brought out - but I’ve accepted that “details” to me are much more important than they are to others.

About this photo - I just kept trying different tools until I got something I enjoyed. I haven’t seen another scene even similar to this in ages - since last November, when I took this series of photos. At the time I had a very different idea about what the image “was”, but I kept cropping things away until I got down to what I enjoyed.

Gee, I wonder if the rest of you have all moved on? I dunno…
L1004657 | 2022-11-12.dng (27.2 MB)
L1004657 | 2022-11-12.dng.dop (16.4 KB)

4 Likes

Hi Mike,

Nobody else has made a comment so I will. The picture as it is, looks very menacing. It looks like a hurricane and the eye of the storm is the clear patch on the left. I do wonder if there is any chance of recovering any detail in the very centre that looks burnt out. Also, have you tried recovering more details in the cloud and foreground.

I have not downloaded the information as I do not believe in working on other people’s pictures.

Nice to see you getting back to photography and taking the pictures that you like for yourself. As far as guns are concerned. I had enough of that in the forces.
I suppose it does help to get any anger out of the system. My method was to take it out on the badminton court against the opponents.