Old Photo Critique | Time and Time Photographer

Apr13 0

Wimping out

Oh no! Its tax time and I’m feeling the crunch. I have way too many things to do so I’m wimping out of my regularly scheduled post for today. It is my intention to post the promised video tomorrow. But so I don’t lose my record for posting every Tuesday and Thursday I’m going to do… an old photo critique from 5 years ago April 9, 2005 taken with an Olympus D40. f2.8 1/30 ISO 131… yes that’s the correct ISO. On automatic modes the ISO can be changed dynamically. And that’s me passed out on the floor.

Here’s the problems with this photo: Too much clutter. Not on the level of the subject. Not close enough.

Here’s the good: Good candid shot. Plenty of definition and color. Obvious subject.

How would I fix it? Crop out some clutter. Rotate to be more level with the subject. Noise reduction (mainly color noise) at that ISO there’s not much luminance noise. Remove the outlet from the wall. Bump up the contrast.

Now isn’t that a better photo in… 47 seconds?

Mar04 0

Old Noisy Panos

Posted by Philip in Old Photo Critique, Photo Processing

Lets turn the way-back machine to March 19th 2000. Almost 10 years ago. I wanted to see what sort of photos I had from my trip to Switzerland and I ran across this set of 4 photos looking out over Lake Zurich. This set has everything going against it.

I used a 1.3 MP point and shoot camera.
No RAW capture. (Was RAW available then?)
I shot this hand-held.
It was early evening.
I took this after being awake for 37 hours with the last 13 hours on a plane.

So quickly stitching this together you get a very boring and noisy photo. (I’m leaving the salvage in on purpose so you can easily see the stitch points.)

Not much to look at but it has some potential. In most landscape photos you want the foreground and the background to be relatively equal in level. But when I try to balance out the foreground I came up with this:

There’s nothing in the foreground detail that screams “look at me.” The foreground is where the bulk of the noise come into play. So it’s probably best to leave the foreground as silhouette and play up be moodiness of the sky and landscape. So when I do this sort of adjustment in Photoshop the first thing I do is to turn the JPG into a smart object. That way I retain all of the original detail no matter how many filters I apply. So my 2 minute adjustment consisted of changing the levels and boosting the saturation of the blues.

Aside from the change in exposure on the right-hand side this turned out to be a fairly reasonable image. It’s not high enough quality to put in a gallery unless I make it a bit more surreal.

I’m not often fond of this look, but in this case it uses the noise in the image to it’s advantage. Either way, I’d opt to have the third image on my wall even it it was a smaller sized photo.

Jan21 0

Pano from the past

Posted by Philip in Old Photo Critique

Wow. I was looking through some old digital photos and found a pano I did back in June of 2002 in Shenandoah, VA. This was taken with my handy Olympus D360L. That was my first digital camera. I got it because of it’s really good low light sensitivity (for that point in time) and the fact that it ran on regular AA batteries. It was incredibly slow to respond when you hit the shutter button, but for a point and shoot it had what I was looking for, wonderfully clear and bright photos.

Even though this was shot midday, there are a few positive points about the photo.

It’s nicely framed between the rocks on the right and the sharp drop-off on the left.
The clouds made some interesting shadows on the mountains.
There is a lot of contrast.
The subject is clear… sorta. In this case I see the subject to be the valley on the left. The flow of the image takes you that direction.

All-in-all this makes for a good landscape photo, even from a 1 megapixel camera. What would make this better? More foreground elements. You can’t tell if the viewer is standing or flying. What do you think? Please feel free to comment below.