If the seats are intended to be the subject for our eyes to be drawn to, I would isolate them more from the background. Dodging and burning would help along with a little blurring.
Our eyes are normally drawn to the brighter parts of an image, in this case the background.
In this case our eyes naturally land on the sunset in the background and are then drawn to the seats in the foreground shadows as a distraction.
I can only add: Tough country...
Generally I agree, but I wouldn't necessarily think of this as a distraction. In this case, I'd see the chairs as adding another dimension to the story. As I see it, they are kind of forlorn and overshadowed by the sunset. It all depends on the story the photographer wants to tell. If the story is the sunset, yes, I'd crop the chairs right out.
I too am very familiar with Cradle Mountain, having day trekked all around there a few times in my teens. One will probably either like or dislike the composite sky. It is not a sky that one would see looking in that direction (South) at the apparent time of day. Looking West possibly but unlikely - it's a very Temperate climate.
Your inclusion of the original and what is missing from that vantage point is what intrigues me. Below the mountain there is a lake (Dove Lake) with an iconic old, old wooden boat shed. Both of which feature in countless photos of the mountain - lots of scenery. The vegetation around the lake is just visible in the lower right corner of the original.
Beechworth is full of history and opportunities for photography. On its own, this shot doesn't excite me much but I think it would be good as part of a series that gets the flavour of Beechworth.
I think it is asking for some contrast and saturation, lowering of highlights and lifting of shadows. That yellow sandstone? is usually quite deep.
Number 4 with the mauves, lilacs and the dragonfly stands out for me - but altogether a pleasant series.
Some very nice oranges and yellows in that sunset. I like how you caught the reflection between the stilts. It would have been remiss not to.
At first glance I thought the chairs were some form of old packing boxes. Even after figuring what they were, they seem an odd shape, and after noticing the person walking amongst them, quite large. Their random placement does seem odd, as being in Germany I can imagine them in neat rows. And the numbers? Hier, Sir, ist Ihr Ticket. Ihre Nummer ist 342
It is pretty much what I saw at the time in that light.
Feel free to edit and post what you feel would look more accurate.
Thank you.
I like shiny things too and I'm impressed with what you managed in low light. If not mentioned I would have just assumed a quite overcast day. The colours and shiny metal suggest some expensive, high tech gear. Apart from being a magnet for light fingered ppl, I wouldn't mind if my camera looked like that...
I'll post photos of our walk around Dove Lake, including the boat shed and Glacier Rock, another time.
I was positive you would have some...
After a lot of toing and froing I bought ACDSee Ultimate - which is on a healthy special at the moment until tomorrow (4/9/24)
Here is my first attempt with a lift in exposure, some other minor changes and lifting of shadows with a (so far) wonderful mask tool that automatically finds and masks the subject.
I was aghast at first with some terrible mottled noise in the sky. Quite some digging revealed that it was caused by preset colour noise reduction - oddly one of very few presets in ACDSee... I had noticed the same thing in RawTherapee and I guess it would have had the same cause.
C&C welcomed on the result
[Edit] Quite frankly I am not impressed with the sharpening - even Faststone does better. Maybe something to learn there...
Between Dan, Bryan, and myself we could probably do a special week of posts on Cradle Mountain. As we have opened this subject up, what I found most interesting in Dan's shot is that he avoided something that most images here do. Photo after photo, including mine, use portrait for Cradle mountain and use the V between the peaks to begin a sight line that takes in one of the features Bryan mentions. Dan did it differently and filled in the V with clouds and added lighting to the cloud edges to take the eye there. I didn't like Dan's colours but it was a different way to deal with the twin peaks.
I don't know anything about AC/DC. Lightroom would handle the shadows here quite well.
Meanwhile, I'd try some experiments in exposing to the right. Even if the sooc still looked dark in the shadows, it would make raising the shadow areas easier without much of a noise penalty.
Nicely framed shot that makes the most of the diagonals. I saw a lot of wedgies driving down the Stuart Highway over the weekend. They were feasting on roadkill.
The ETTR technique involves setting base iso, the widest aperture that gives the required dof and then slow the shutter speed until the camera's histogram touches the right side.
Normally you can't do that for BIF because at base iso you won't be able to get a fast enough shutter speed to freeze flapping wings and push the histogram to the right hand side edge.
In any case, ETTR is most beneficial in low light situations where there is much more initial headroom for the histogram to be pushed to the right. In good light the headroom is much less and so the benefits of ETTR are then minimal.
To put the maximum amount of light onto the sensor within dof and blur requirements without clipping highlights for BIF the best way I know is to set the widest aperture for my dof and the slowest shutter speed that will freeze motion in the scene. I then let iso land wherever it likes as long as highlights are not clipped.
The camera mode that works best for me for BIF is aperture priority with auto iso and a minimum shutter speed set.
I set the widest aperture that gives my dof and I set the minimum shutter speed to the slowest that will freeze motion - eg. flapping wings.
This maximises the quality of the raw data within the above requirements by maximising the SNR and so minimising visible noise.
It then becomes very easy for any reputable noise removal app to remove the visible noise.
Working with nominally 16 bit raw files instead of 8 bit jpegs also gives much more flexibility in post processing, eg raising shadows, dialling back highlights etc.
I wasn't happy so went back to the start. It turns out that using the automask in ACDSee, and tweaking exposure and or a few other things too (not so) far introduces some artifacts around the edges.
ACDSee does have another tool called LightEQ. It has Shadows, Midtones and Highlights. Adjusting these globally produced a result I was happy with. It seems this is the only place were shadows can be adjusted. In the General pane or masking pane, the option is Fill Light which seems to affect bright and dark areas together. I will ask questions about these things in the online help when I get "approved".
So I used ACDSee to adjust shadows and highlights, exported as a Tiff, went into RawTherapee and adjusted exposure and sharpening there. I am not happy that the sharpening in ACDSee seems lacklustre, but as I said above I may be missing something.
Sorry if this all seems a bit of a ramble and not appropriate in C&C... At least I feel a little comfortable now (touch wood) that I have a workflow that I may be able to use on all the images that need it - there are others of the eagles I want to put together in a series.
