* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #801 / Revived #021 on 2023 08 23 *

Brave man and great background.

Amazing what a great impact little nature's "fluff" has. Excellent.

Cast Away

Very sad, those agricultural machines were once used extensively for harvesting etc and now are just sitting idling...They are now part of the landscape and soon will be totally enveloped by vegetation. Sign of times.

Surprise
Recovering from surgery last week. Sometimes when I lack the wherewithal to take or even search the archives for a picture to post, I play Wednesday C&C Roulette, where I spin the LR catalog and wherever it lands, I re-edit/submit that one. This time it landed on a photo I'd never developed because it was so underexposed I couldn't even tell what it was. I knew from its tags that it was from a stay on Vancouver Island about 5 years ago. So I put the newest Lightroom tools to work on it and got a more respectable result than I figured I would. If you don't look too close...

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Like that shot. It has all the components needed for a classic Nature's capture. The flow of the water is very engaging, maybe too blue a bit...Otherwise excellent effort.

I absolutely love it - it's such a wonderful color combination. Feels like a very uplifting and positive image to me with the beautiful light on the left and the resulting lively colors. Excellent choice and (even though I don't have the comparison) effective processing. 👍

The Old City Walls

This could be from a dream about the Tales from 1001 Nights. In fact there are a lot of connections and especially with how a dream corresponds to reality.
It was taken in Bukhara, where some of those tales were set or collected.
Those impenetrable city walls are actually the only part of the wall once circling the city, although they are beautifully restored.
That lovely lake in the foreground was really a muddy puddle, close to the camera, from a recent thunderstorm.
Never believe what a photographer shows you, all too often we try to create a dream.

Pete

😁Indeed! 😁

Thanks for sharing this, Pete. I like the photo, although B&W is not my thing at all. However, I find it perhaps over-processed (the speckles in the sky and the trees, for instance). It may be just me, but I want to be able to see the bricks in the walls more clearly when I look at it large. By the way, what is "pattern" metering mode?

David

Love the combination of colors and the composition as a whole. Excellent work - you seem to have a very refined eye for those things. I'm not sure what it is though... but the Dock makes me think it could be part of a boat?

Perhaps you've seen that I've created a number of threads dedicated to specific colors here:
dprevived.com/c/image-discussions-critiques-and-challenges/48/

Some of your images would be a great fit for those, however the expertly use of color combinations makes them particularly fitting for one I want to create in the future on that very theme (color combinations). Not really sure how to name or specify that... should it be limited to "complementary colors" or "strong color contrast"? I'd love to have your input there, if you have any thoughts!

And apart from that, I feel like your impressive eye for composition (besides the images here, I've visited your website) would make you a prime candidate for writing something on the matter in form of some editorial content, dprevived is going to get in future... So if you would be up for that and @AlanSh or someone else from the team hasn't approached you yet, I'm here to testify, that I would certainly be very interested in reading something like that! 👍

Yes, it is over-processed now that I look at it again. I am away from home this week(again!), and grabbed an old jpeg to show this week before I left home. For a change, this week it is probably better if you don’t look at the large size version 😂

Pattern metering on the Olympus meters separately for the four quarters of the frame, plus a circle in the middle, and uses that to guess the sky, the subject and produce a suitable average reading. It sounds flaky, but is actually very reliable, and easy to fix with a bit of under or over correction, if it is out.

They are both lovely in different ways.

The first with its subdued color palette of pale apricots and darker greys and browns, and all the delicate masts and webbing shown sharply against the sky but with water distortions in the reflection. I don't really like the effect of the foreground dock-edge which seems too dark for the rest of the photo and an eye magnet. It might be difficult to get rid of without cropping but I think lightening it a bit would help it come in line with the boat structures.

The second is a totally abstracted view of the masts, I presume, with darker and more vivid colors induced perhaps by altering brightness in post. It works, as good abstracts do, in the manner of music, with a nice rhythm. There are a few black dots I'd remove. Very nice outcome.

Is it an unripened raspberry? Or something more exotic that I don't have here, like a salmon berry? You definitely captured its difference, and its up- close beauty in the most minute detail with its rumpled texture and tiny appendages that we probably eat without ever seeing or considering. You make us appreciate the tiny things of life, especially the tiny living things, in new ways, and I thank you for that gift.

Yes ... Indeed ...

WhyNot

I think it turned out quite nicely. The delicacy and depth of the seed pods really shows up more in the monochrome version, and you also see more of the reflective nature of the whites. Reducing the contrast between lights and darks in the background helped a lot.

It's lovely just as you have it, but if you want to try for even more separation of the dandelion from the grassy background, there's a few things you could try. Now maybe try adding a bit of vignette to see if it will do more. Some programs let you paint a mask to darken targeted areas, so you could try that instead, to get the light stuff in the background to get a bit darker.

Swinging away above the clouds that are nestled in a gigantic mountain range far below is totally unexpected, and we immediately register it in the impossible range of things. We appreciate the unlikeliness of it and try to figure out how it could be possible, but we can never fully reconcile it emotionally in spite of believing your explanation. So it remains in the realm of nebulous possibilities, a scary but fun photo that we will never emulate. Brilliant framing and timing.

I would not be able to resist compositing it with a photo shot out the window of a commercial jet, one of those that shows the wing.

One of the more intriguing modern glass front buildings I've seen, because of those pyramidal-shaped structures extruding from the glass surface. The reflections from those smaller structures intermingle with the reflections on the overall glass surface and we can easily slip down a rabbit hole of figuring out what is being reflected and what isn't. You caught the building at a very photogenic time, either very early or very late in the day at "good" light, and with gorgeous clouds that work very well to show off the reflective nuances. Well done series.