My first pic up for critique - overcast at sunset

[wfooshee]

I've contributed to a few of these threads, and elsewhere in the forum. Nobody here knows me from Adam, so by way of introduction, I'm not a professional, but I'm a fairly serious hobbyist with an occasional flash of brilliance. I'll be 55 this year, and have been shooting 35mm film since 1980, and just went digital less than 4 years ago.

My first "real" camera was my dad's 1952 Voigtlander Vitessa, a folding rangefinder (which I still have,) and I had to carry around a light meter and calculate flash exposures from guide numbers. This was at Christmas 1979.

My first SLR was a Canon AE-1 which I "stole" from a friend of my sister's who got it for his birthday and had no interest in it. I offered him a hunnert bucks, and got the camera with a 50mm f/4.

When auto-focusing came out, I got a Nikon N8008, and just over 3 years ago moved to digital with a used Nikon D50. I upgraded that to a D5000 last summer.

That's me. To the image. Too much talk, not enough picture!

This is one of those you see while driving somewhere and it reminds you of why you always have your camera with you. This was shot from the sidewalk of a bridge over this bayou, an inlet off of the bay here. It had been a bad day, storming all day, and was letting up late in the afternoon. It was still overcast, but calm. This is looking almost due north, and the sunset is starting to my left.

What struck me about the scene and made me stop was the calmness of the water, and the barest presence of color in the sky. It was like a living black-and-white scene, barely colored with a little flame from the west.

I'm posting the full frame, and then a crop I tried just to get rid of the foreground material. The vignette is something the Voigtlander did at full aperture.

My slide scanner is an ancient Nikon LS-2000, used from eBay last year when I needed to start scanning Dad's slide library after he passed away, and it seems to contribute its fair share of noise to the images I get from it.

[MB1]

To me you are too far away from everything.

[wfooshee]

I can see that, but my intended subject was the bare amount of color in the water and sky, and not anything that happened to actually be in the frame. In other words, the water itself.

Besides, I had the physical limitations of not being able to walk closer to anything in the picture, what with not being able to stand on water, and the camera had a fixed 50mm lens.

[llewpics]

First off, welcome to the forum. Thank you for sharing with us about your passion for photography. It is fun to hear how people have come to be interested in this great form of artistic expression (among other things).

I think one of the biggest challenges a photographer has is to find a way to relay the feelings and emotions he/she experienced in the photo to others who are looking at it later. I understand your thoughts while taking the photo (calmness, sky, non saturated environment) - but I was having a hard time getting away with that when looking at it myself. I think a big part of this may be the fact this is a somewhat poorly scanned image. There is a considerable amount of noise and I don't think there is much change of tone throughout the sky and water. It would be a stronger image if tones were a little more colorful, perhaps - especially the orange of the coming dawn. There is a strong vignette in the corners of the image - I am not sure if this was from the lens or post processing. I would crop the grass and bushes away from the bottom ...I don't think they add to the scene. A boat, a bird, fisherman or similar would work in the photo as well.

Please keep posting - we are all learning from each other.

[GB1]

Belated welcome Wfooshee! I agree with llewpics: a big challenge in photography, especially in this type of image, is to find a way to convey the 'mood' of the scene to a flat 2-D media w/o losing the feeling. I've found that soft, moody lighting like in this scene is the toughest, but it can be done. I use as wide an angle focal length as possible, and bracket my images. This one I think may be a tad bit too bright, something I found normally happens with the camera meters, so I shoot about 1/3 to 1 f stop under.

Another point to make is subject. Most of the time, a picture really needs a central point for the viewer to grab ahold of, but there are exceptions: this may be one of them, as the entire scene and sky may be it. But at the same time, you have to consider the foreground objects. I see some trees on the side and a small structure on the left, but a land strip in the middle that slightly blocks the viewer's view, constricting the scene. Unfortunately, there's no way that the viewer can really ignore these things and just try to imagine what the scene was like overall - they all effect the final image. Someone once said something like "It isn't about what the subject/scene looks like, but what it looks like when photographed." Also, you may want to sharpen it up a bit after resizing and scanning.

Hope this helps -- keep posting.

G

[wfooshee]

The process of getting this picture presented some challenges.

It's actually set on a busy thoroughfare, business alongside the road. As I crossed the bridge over this bayou the color caught my eye. The road curved just past this bridge, so I actually couldn't see the sky directly towards the sunset, what with 80 and 100-foot pine trees along that curve. I think that it would do better without the boathouse or the spit of dirt across the bayou, but that stuff was there, nothing to be done about it. There was no other viewpoint over water that I could reach while this light existed.

I looked out over the side of the bridge as I was crossing and was stuck by the nearly complete lack of color, and that's what I was trying to record.

The other limitation was the camera at the time, a folding-lens manual rangefinder with a 50mm lens, no other choices. I only took the one frame because I didn't like "wasting" film. ( Remember those days??) So this was a spur-of-the-moment give-it-a-shot kind of thing.

My scanner does not do well with slides that are predominantly one color, as this one is, or with slides that are fairly low light, as this one is, and it gets a significant amount of noise. I've tried scanning it at 8-bit and 12-bit, and while 12-bit is a little bit better, by the time you drop it into a jpg the noise pretty much all comes back. The vignette is on the slide, came from the camera. I suppose it did that in a certain aperture range.

I'm going to take some of what was said her, maybe try a re-scan. Looking at this post and comparing to the projected image, the scanner seems to have seriously cooled the white balance, too, shifted the overall image towards the blue.


EDIT: Here's a quick-and-dirty effort at shifting the white balance a bit warmer. I didn't bother painting out the crab trap float or doing anything else. It's still noisy and quite dark, but the color is closer to what I see projected.