When things goes wrong...

[Seb]

Hello all,

I went back downtown last night (with a backup battery, I will never get out of power on the field anymore) for some more shooting. After 1 hour of experimentation with various things I decided to go with the serious stuff and to reissue some of my previous pictures... which is when it started raining. Thus, I went back home only to discover that my experimentation gave very poor results.

Anyways here are two shoots which I feel I got right exposure wise yet the framing seriously sucks. Do you guy's think that there would be any way to save them with some serious cropping? I tried to figure out if I could do something with them but I am out of ideas right now. Feel free to crop them (or to say that they are totally helpless).

regards

Seb

[another view]

Feel free to crop them (or to say that they are totally helpless)

Sorry Seb - I'm gonna have to call these a learning experience. You don't get portfolio shots everytime you go out, but hopefully you see something or learn something that will help you out one day. And you learned about night exposures.

Think about learning to do this with slide film (as I did...): You shoot and take notes because that's the only way you'll know what you did when the film comes back. Try it, wait a few days for the results, see what worked and what didn't. Think about how to get better results and start the process over again. Rolls of film (and dollars) later, you'll see some improvement - but with digital you know right now.

There are usually interesting architectural details on buildings that are good to keep an eye open for with buildings like this too.

[PuckJunkey]

The second wouldn't look too bad after some perspective correction.

The first one might've been able to be saved, except for: the trees and bushes in front obscure the structure, the "wing" on the right side of the mansion is not visible on the left (for balance), and there's no sky that you captured above the structure, which would be need to fix the perspective and then make the required crop.

I am curious though: were those colors coming from gel-lights that they have directed onto the structures, or Photoshop or something else?

[Seb]

The second wouldn't look too bad after some perspective correction.

The first one might've been able to be saved, except for: the trees and bushes in front obscure the structure, the "wing" on the right side of the mansion is not visible on the left (for balance), and there's no sky that you captured above the structure, which would be need to fix the perspective and then make the required crop.

I am curious though: were those colors coming from gel-lights that they have directed onto the structures, or Photoshop or something else?

Hello PuckJunkey,

Thank you for your comments. The colors come from real lights. There is strictly nothing fake here. Actually, they are not exactly that pink for real (the color rendering is a tad flawed, perhaps because of white balance) but very close to it.

Seb

[Seb]

Sorry Seb - I'm gonna have to call these a learning experience. You don't get portfolio shots everytime you go out, but hopefully you see something or learn something that will help you out one day. And you learned about night exposures.

Think about learning to do this with slide film (as I did...): You shoot and take notes because that's the only way you'll know what you did when the film comes back. Try it, wait a few days for the results, see what worked and what didn't. Think about how to get better results and start the process over again. Rolls of film (and dollars) later, you'll see some improvement - but with digital you know right now.

There are usually interesting architectural details on buildings that are good to keep an eye open for with buildings like this too.

Hello Another View,

Thank you for your honnesty, that is exactly what I need.

regards

Seb