Somerton deep approaches

Aha, the low angle POV. My knees tell me I can't do this any more :)

Really like the look you've got going here Toni - especially with the blurring. I'd probably push the blacks a bit more into the black but that's purely a taste thing I think. Really like that 1st one. Composition is nailed, and there isn't an ounce I'd trim out.
 
Harlequin565 said:
Aha, the low angle POV. My knees tell me I can't do this any more :)

Really like the look you've got going here Toni - especially with the blurring. I'd probably push the blacks a bit more into the black but that's purely a taste thing I think. Really like that 1st one. Composition is nailed, and there isn't an ounce I'd trim out.
Click to expand...

Thanks Ian - it's what flip-out screens are for. ;)

I should probably confess my sins with these. I've just acquired a tilt adapter (no shift) for Nikon-Sony FE, and used my old Nikkor 28 f3.5 AI-S set to roughly hyperfocal distance for these, however I failed to check operation & used it upside down, meaning that instead of the tilt keeping the foreground sharp, instead it blurred the upper section of the image. :rolleyes: Rather than waste what looked like a happy accident, I processed the pictures and rather liked the slightly unusual look.

The blacks are crushed a bit because the image is just a bit too 'soot & whitewash' with a full tonal range, and like this I can block up shadow areas to reduce complexity and push the eye where I want it to go without the image being super-dark.
 
ancient_mariner said:
The blacks are crushed a bit because the image is just a bit too 'soot & whitewash' with a full tonal range, and like this I can block up shadow areas to reduce complexity and push the eye where I want it to go without the image being super-dark.
Click to expand...

Thinking about this a bit more, in some whays it's a lot like a slightly under-exposed film shot where the neg is a touch thin in the shadows and the exposure is held back a little in the darkroom to keep the highlights right. I'm not trying to replicate film, but perhaps I am trying to 'print' a little.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Thinking about this a bit more, in some whays it's a lot like a slightly under-exposed film shot where the neg is a touch thin in the shadows and the exposure is held back a little in the darkroom to keep the highlights right. I'm not trying to replicate film, but perhaps I am trying to 'print' a little.
Click to expand...

Interesting... My monitor is set up so that when I print, I get exactly what I see on my screen, and there is a "blotchiness" to the shadows in the areas below. (Fully appreciate you have "NO" as edit my images so will remove after you've seen it unless you say otherwise)

Screenshot 2021-05-10 224039.jpg

This could be down to forum-jpeg-scrambling of course and what you see might be different. Also my screenie of your photo has been effectively double-scrambled by the internet...

The first image only suffers from this in the top and bottom left corner and it's much more of a minor thing as the deep shadow used to frame the image isn't there.
 
Harlequin565 said:
Interesting... My monitor is set up so that when I print, I get exactly what I see on my screen, and there is a "blotchiness" to the shadows in the areas below. (Fully appreciate you have "NO" as edit my images so will remove after you've seen it unless you say otherwise)

View attachment 318138

This could be down to forum-jpeg-scrambling of course and what you see might be different. Also my screenie of your photo has been effectively double-scrambled by the internet...

The first image only suffers from this in the top and bottom left corner and it's much more of a minor thing as the deep shadow used to frame the image isn't there.
Click to expand...

Thanks for taking the time to comment and investigate this Ian, I really appreciate it. You've not tried to re-edit my image & present it to me differently, and we're all good on that front.

I've been back to look at both the mono post Silver Efex and the original raw: the blotches are present on the mono conversion, but not the colour raw file, so it *looks* like something I introduced while processing in silver Efex. :rolleyes: It seems as though certain sections of the image have blotches that are distinctly darker than the remainder of the shadow area, and although I did some final post-processing in Lightroom to the mono image, nothing there makes any difference.

If I get some time (and the will) I'll go back later and re-process to see a) what caused it and b) how best to prevent it happening again.

Bother.
 
I wish you all the best. Bear in mind I can be a bit of a pedant at times and probably no one else would notice. Unfortunately you can't unsee it sadly....
 
Cause identified: when using Silver EfexI quite often reduce structure in shadows and mid tones to zero, because that smooths out shadow areas and leaves them nicely velvety while leaving larger details like the ripples on water evident. In this case, dropping the shadows structure slider below about -45% caused the artefacts to appear in the shadows, and no amount of fiddling seemed to eliminate the problem. Lifting the shadow structure to about -35% is necessary, but that leaves the image feeling hard and more contrasty than wanted & none of the tricks I had seemed to otherwise fix it in Silver Efex. Moving the image back to lightroom permitted some smoothing out, but it doesn't have the same velvety shadows with detail and soft highlights of the first version. I may have to embark on some surgical cloning to fix the issue because all the usual processing tools seem ineffective.
 
Glad you got to the bottom of it Toni. Sorry to have caused you such a pain :(
 
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