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Roger Williams
{K:86139} 8/4/2005
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Keith, TODAY (August 4) I got the comment you posted on July 28 but that appeared not to get through. You obviously didn't stay seated at the keyboard long enough! I agree that an out-of-focus "echo" can be a nice addition to a macro photo. But it's either there or it isn't, in my world. I wouldn't add one, just for effect... So for me I guess flowers just "are."
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Roger Williams
{K:86139} 7/28/2005
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Keith, I found the pbase photographer both inspirational and daunting. He makes me realise how very pedestrian my own photos are... he has a great talent. Thanks for the intro. But despite his great photos he gets very few comments, and most of them the kind of one-liner looked down upon at Usefilm. A very different culture!
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Roger Williams
{K:86139} 7/28/2005
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My previous note crossed with yours in the mail! We must have been online at the same time. Thanks for the pointers. I'll follow them up with interest.
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Roger Williams
{K:86139} 7/28/2005
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I'm grateful for your persistence, Keith. This is just to let you know you were successful. Now, er, just what was it you wanted to say...? I'm caring less about making "good" macros these days because I'm having so much fun finding a whole slew of new subjects in my rather closely prescribed and mostly urban environment. "Fun" is important, right?
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Keith Naylor
{K:13064} 7/28/2005
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OK so that comment got through - now why didn't the previous ones?
Anyway .... I think you are doing great with macros, theres so much you can do, if you need some ideas on composition and 'seeing' the image then have a look at this guys portfolio (pbase.com/sjusczyk) its very inspirational, especially the natural imaging sections.
I like to use repeating shapes whenever I can, for example (pbase.com/falcn/image/46754469) where I put the same flower out of focus in the background.
Hope some of this helps
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Keith Naylor
{K:13064} 7/28/2005
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ROger, I've been trying to comment on this, I've tried 4 times now but the commnet never registers.
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Keith Naylor
{K:13064} 7/28/2005
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Roger,
you are doing great with these macros. You are wrong that flowers jusr ARE, there is so much more you can do with them compositionally. I like to have repeating shapes in the background using a flower of the same type but out of focus - have a look at http://www.pbase.com/falcn/image/46754469 as an example.
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Roger Williams
{K:86139} 7/27/2005
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Margaret, I really like your crop. Thanks! I have quite good noise filter software but it isn't noise in my case but grain, of course. I am so used to this (shooting mainly 400 and 800 ISO) that I rarely bother to minimise it. It IS more prominent in macros, though... so perhaps I should.
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Keith Naylor
{K:13064} 7/27/2005
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Roger, there are several ways of adding interest into the composition. I like to have a repeating flower but out of focus in the background. Have a look at this as an example http://www.pbase.com/falcn/image/46754469
Keith
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Margaret Sturgess
{K:49403} 7/27/2005
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Roger Flowers just are !!!!! LOL see what you think ... I must admit with film and then scanning it brings up problems. Did have a quick look at comments - I am not technical enough to 'enter the fray' as it were. One of the things I did with this was to run it through noise filter. Of course I do agree macros are fascinating
Margaret
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Roger Williams
{K:86139} 7/27/2005
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It may be that Al has now found out how silly this is and has stopped doing it. It was still true in recent months, though. It's usually most noticeable on contrasty images that already are well sharpened. What happens is they acquire edge sharpening artifacts, white lines alongside black ones, that kind of thing, and a "grainy" look in areas without much detail. And if you look at the image information you find the file is much smaller than the one you uploaded. Worth avoiding! If your file is near the maximum size anyway (i.e., not very highly compressed) and not particularly sharp, you probably wouldn't notice the difference. I very carefully optimize the sharpness of my images and was really annoyed when I found out the reason some of them looked so bad after I'd uploaded them. Nice "talking" to you...
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Ellen Smith
{K:14418} 7/27/2005
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I'm just slightly less confused, sometimes I have up loaded at 300 dpi but didn't notice a difference.
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Roger Williams
{K:86139} 7/27/2005
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Ellen, dpi at the scanner are different from dpi at the printer. The 1,200dpi is applied to the 24 x 36mm of the standard 135 film frame (that's one by one-and-a-half inches). That would only give a 300dpi print that was 4 x 6 inches. Where you need high res. is in scanning the neg (or slide). On screen, of course, dpi is quite meaningless. All that matters is the number of pixels. Whether you upload them at a nominal 72dpi or 300dpi doesn't make any difference at all to what people can print, or to the size of the file, or the quality of the image! It's only the pixels that matter (currently 800 x 800 maximum on Usefilm). Well, actually I'm wrong in one detail. It DOES make a difference at Usefilm, because the upload software checks the dpi and applies further compression and sharpening to images that are uploaded at 300dpi. Crazy, but there you are. I hope your comment about using 300dpi didn't apply to uploads here, because if so you're doing yourself a disservice.
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Ellen Smith
{K:14418} 7/27/2005
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I see your point. I work with 300 dpi is it different with film? It seems 1200 dpi would be worlds better.
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Roger Williams
{K:86139} 7/27/2005
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Thanks for the feedback, Ellen. The problem with getting the flower at an angle is that the petals, etc., are no longer in the same plane and you compound your depth-of-focus problems. At the moment, to save time, I use shop scans to CD-ROM, which are surprisingly good but effectively only 1,200 dpi. This means I don't have much leeway to crop and expand. If I want to, though, I can use my own film scanner, which has 3,200dpi resolution, and would enable me to use one third of the image area without significant loss of quality. Of course, it would show up camera shake, poor focus, and grain that much more, but that applies (substituting "noise" for "grain") to digital images.
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Ellen Smith
{K:14418} 7/27/2005
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Looks good Roger. One of the things I've found that works for composition is to shoot the flower at an angle then give a bit of space to the area where the flower is looking.
http://www.usefilm.com/image/864315.html
I was hard pressed to find an example. lol
All talk I guess.
I'm at a loss as to how you go from film to the computer and don't know how it reacts to different treatments. For instance how tight a crop could you do on this before it started to break down and look bad?
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