Commons:Photography critiques/2008 January

Blue scoria

• I'd like to get better sharpness. Could it be possible (not changing my camera for the moment). Thanks. --B.navez 15:01, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

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• You can try downsampling the image, and/or combined several photos with smaller DOFs with CombineZM. Do you have any other lenses besides the 70mm? --Digon3 ^talk 15:15, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

For the moment I have no retouching softwares and just this camera SONY DSLR-A100 with 35/70 mm lens.--B.navez 18:39, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

• Is the shadow really supposed to be that blue? The iridescent colours of the haematite I understand, but the shadow??. I tried a colour balance adjustment. Is that very different from the real sample? Lycaon 17:53, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Blue effect depends a lot on the light and the orientation. You look at it one way it's very blue, another way almost brown. I took the picture under full day light. Blue shadow seemed to me exaggerated but I will check it when shiny days come back. I prefer the retouched version which seems to me more realistic. Thanks.--B.navez 18:39, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

• A really nice free editing software is GIMP, which can downsample to improve sharpness. --Digon3 ^talk 19:13, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
• Thanks a lot for GIMP, I've uploaded it. It looks nice making my first steps. I have uploaded a new picture too. --B.navez 08:50, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Be careful using GIMP to scale images, by default on some installs (Ubuntu 7.04 for example) it will not use the highest quality settings. --Ianare 06:30, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
• The shadow in the third picture looks a lot better and very natural. There is still a slight sharpness problem, but I think it is from the large DOF. You can try merging several photos with smaller DOFs with the free program CombineZM, or try F/14, and that should help with the sharpness. --Digon3 ^talk 16:47, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Jacksonville Night Panorama

• This is my first attempt at a night shot. Any suggestion on how I can take a better night panorama the next time I go there? --Digon3 ^talk 15:43, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Some of the input photos show camera shake. Look at ING of "LANDING", or the left of the two blue piers, there you see a diagonal shake. There is some more. On the plus side, your photos seam to be in focus (can be a problem, but then on your camera I presume you control the distance manually); and your lense does not give you halos around bright lights. -- Klaus with K 18:16, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
    • The shake on some of the photos was unavoidable without a remote camera release since just just pushing the button to take the picture would cause camera shake (I was using a 75-300mm lens). Do you have any suggestions about the exposure or how to reduce the noise without having to downsample so much? --Digon3 ^talk 15:04, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
      • For the camera shake I guess I should have used the self-timer. --Digon3 ^talk 19:44, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
        • Use a solid object to rest your camera on (I rarely carry a tripod with me), and yes, self timer like 2 seconds of delay can help. Or are these hand-held shots? -- Klaus with K 15:38, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
          • I took the pictures with a tripod with a 5 second exposure because there was no place to put the camera that wasn't blocked by trees.

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  Don't go there at night, go there at twilight, these pictures tend to look better when you have at least some color in the sky. --che 21:28, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

• • I don't take panoramas, so it's hard for me to be confident about whether night or twilight is better. For single shots, I like to look at twilight. However, the Jacksonville panorama shows some blocks of sky that are darker than other blocks. It would be best to avoid brightness mismatches like these, and I'd guess the light changes faster at twilight, making it harder to take photos with matching sky brightnesses. Does anyone have experience with this? Fg2 11:48, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Neuenstein Castle

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  (reverted) original version
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  modified (colour change), now new name as well...
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  attempt at brightening
  (Lycaon)

• With a rather wide-angle image (stitched from several photos) I wonder what would be a proper crop for this view? So far I have tried two versions, with and without most of the mirror image. -- Klaus with K 15:57, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

• I prefer the middle one, although the tree framing on the left picture is also quite nice. The right one, IMO, is too close up and lacks the reflection. It would also be a shame to put a multiple image together and then only use a small fraction of it. Lycaon 16:16, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
• I prefer the left one, as I too agree that the tree framing is nice, and I find the composition slightly more attractive than the middle one. Agree with Lycaon concerning the right one, it just isn't right ;-) -- Slaunger 10:50, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

• The stitch is "exposed to the right", there is slight colour fringing looking at some leafs, sharpness should be ok given the large pixel size (otherwise I'll downsample...). Would these(left, middle) make the grade for QI or even FP? ;-) -- Klaus with K 13:57, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Certainly QI in my opionion. For FP I find the overall impression of the picture too dark. Just my 2 cents! ;-) --Simonizer 14:46, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
    • Agree with Simonizer, and although I think the one to the left is the best photo, I think the one to the right is the most valuable, and it could be a VI (Valuable Image), it is IMO the best illustration of Neuenstein Castle for online use in Wikimedia projects. -- Slaunger 20:22, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
• Two things I am wondering. What about a portrait crop of castle and reflection? And regarding the dark foreground, how to brighten it up without loosing colour intensity or overexposing the sky. -- Klaus with K 15:15, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Thanks Lycaon for your attempt of brightening the image. I like it. -- Klaus with K 15:35, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
• I just noticed that a new version of Image:Neuenstein Schloss01 crop1 2007-09-22.jpg has been uploaded using the existing name. Pulls the rug under some of the earlier discussion... -- Klaus with K 15:35, 22 January 2008 (UTC)