Post your best current shots

[Steve U]

Nice image Damian, I like the details on the hill, the tree is sharp and the sky is amazing.

[Sheiky]

My monitor is not 3rd party calibrated rather I just ran through the manufacturer's calibration steps. I have an HP ZR22w. Its said to reproduce sRGB quite well out of the box.....hope this looks okay on your monitors.

Nice shot Damian. On my monitor (sRGB calibrated) the clouds look amazing, the hill indeed has a lot of detail, but much of that is lost in the dark. For me the hill would be too dark.

Hope this works. Not sure how to upload a pic so it doesn't present as the thumbnail. I'm uploading from my computer....

When you uploaded it and you're still writing your post. Just double click on the thumbnail and select the size you want to show. You can also edit your post and double click on the image to see the image properties.

Good luck with HDR, it's a great tool and you might get addicted to it

[Jayson]

Here's a recent shot of mine. Trying to keep myself busy.

[Kayaker72]

Damian, I like the shot and agree with the others that the hill has detail but is a little dark, but hey, if that is what it looked like, great job. I do really like the sky. Great colors.

Jayson...another good shot, I like the lighting, how the tree is almost silhouetted and even behind the ball is better lite than the front....

So, does this look like a nice Eider to you??



'Cause this Eider turned out to be a bit of a bully.....





....and a seagull happened to fly past....



Thanks for viewing.....Brant

[DLS]

Thanks Steve U, Jan and Brant! Helpful comments. I intentionally cranked the blacks up to silhouette the hill partly to accent the sky, partly because I didn't want the houses to distract the viewer....but maybe I'll re-work it to see what it looks like brightened up a bit. Maybe the brightness setting on my monitor is too high - I think I have it set to 40 or 50%.

A quick question too: the initial HDR produced by CS5 looks very washed out and I find that I'm using LR to do all my tweaking (tone curve, up contrast, up blacks).....CS5 has more "power" though doesn't it? Should I be using it only for HDR PP?

Thanks for the tip on upsizing Jan. A couple of questions though. When I hover my cursor over the image, the metadata says its 92 KB in size (I uploaded a 800kb file i think). And when I copy the image out of TDP to, say, my desktop, right-click and read the metadata, there is none! My copyright, and camera info are gone.....ideas anyone?

@Jayson: Love that shot! I especially like how the light behind the tree is "mirrored" by the light just behind the ball....I like the symmetry of that effect.

@Brant: great shots of the ducks and the seagull is great!

Damian

[Don Burkett]

A quick question too: the initial HDR produced by CS5 looks very washed out and I find that I'm using LR to do all my tweaking (tone curve, up contrast, up blacks).....CS5 has more "power" though doesn't it? Should I be using it only for HDR PP?
Damian

Damian,
Don't have Cs5, but when trying to achieve photo-realistic HDR, in Photomatix I find it leaves my midtones flat as well. It's an easy fix with the curves tool that is now just part of my HDR work flow.

[Don Burkett]

Jason, Love the ornament, great lighting. The tree makes a great background. If I were to nit my suggestion would be to move the box by the tree. It's right in the sweet spot and grabs my eye off the ornament. Either way, very creative.

[Steve U]

Love the desaturated Chrissy image and the agro ducks.

Shooting a wedding today for a friend, so I hired the 70-200mmMK2 to give me some versatility. A test shot on Leroy Brown the Iggy.
[img]
Leroy_6 by Steve's Life, on Flickr[/img]

Thanks for viewing.

[Jayson]

Jason, Love the ornament, great lighting. The tree makes a great background. If I were to nit my suggestion would be to move the box by the tree. It's right in the sweet spot and grabs my eye off the ornament. Either way, very creative.

Thank you for the comments Don, Damian, Brant, and Steve. It was actually a kid chair and I realized it was there only after I started working the photos. I tried to remove it but it was really noticeable, so I just left it there. I think if I do it again, it would definitely be gone and I had a couple of other things I cropped out also.

Jayson

[DLS]

Jayson: FWIW I didn't even notice the chair until it was mentioned.....the ball grabs my attention first, then the specular highlights combined with the shape of the tree, then the lighting...IMO you could sell that photo for Christmas cards - I'd buy it!

@ Steve U: Great shot. I like the DOF. Boy would I like to have the 70-200 II......

Damian