* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #857 / Revived #077 on 2024 09 18 *

Some people have this insatiable desire to psychoanalyze every picture -
Facts are: image taker envisioned a scene and selected A for aperture priority and together with setting a lens at f/2.8 and 12mm , camera optimized the process at iso 125 and 1/8000s. That's it, that all. End of story.

Love this burst of red. Very engaging and attractive and appealing.

That's fine but it sounds like that to select aperture you simply "spin" the aperture dial and wherever it lands is the aperture you use.

For that scene if the rocks were important to me I would have chosen a much smaller aperture to get as much of the rocks at least reasonably sharp.

The vignette is a little too distracting for me and you left behind some highlight headroom.

This version with the vignette removed and tonally adjusted in ACR and Photoshop Elements looks better on my screen.

Just some food for thought 😊

Very nice shot but I would try to make the dragonfly stand out a bit more by blurring the background more and making use of the highlight headroom still available.

This version has more punch on my screen.

If I was an editor or photo editor at a glossy magazine that might be the result. Depending on the magazine it still might be considered too far.

For the record, I am trying to document what one sees in nature. I am not into lollipops. I already pushed contrast and saturation far higher than I would normally. The original was quite washed out but seemed to survive the process.

Lollipops look better on my screen.

As long as you are happy with your images that's all that matters.

It would have looked better without cropping out some of the tail.

You can effectively reduce the effect of the background with strong blurring and then use a gradient on the layer mask to gradually reduce the blurring to what you want closer to the subject.

You don't necessarily need to crop an image to reduce the effect of a background.

Also the wings are transparent which clearly (excuse the pun) shows the problem with using hard masks, you create a defined boundary of change making that change clearly visible. It looks odd. If you use a "soft mask", one with a feathered edge and literally painted with a very soft edged brush that gradation becomes far less visible.

There are also two ways of giving the dragonfly more saturation and contrast, the other is by reducing the contrast and vibrancy of the background. No false blur is needed as a side effect of blur is reduced contrast, so you're half way there. Try using a curves layer to reduce contrast and also brighten slightly as the brighter (more white) is more convincing to the eye as slightly de-saturated.

A mild sharpen with the "high Pass" method can help the impression of brightness by adding the impression of specular highlights.

Though I find the image a little too dark and therefore appears a little dull. I would lighten (levels layer) and you can have more saturation/vibrance without sacrificing any realism. The compression of tones and things like tone mapping haver a far bigger impact on the "reality" of an image.

Bryan doesn't want to add saturation or contrast.

The point I was making is that you don't necessarily need to crop off the tail to reduce the "busy-ness" of the background he was trying to reduce.

@Bryan - and edited from the first response, hence Dan's reply. Dan has a habit of promoting false narratives and flooding the thread, thus obscuring/burying/diluting different opinions.

It's about the relative nature of vision and images, the appearance of colour is subjective because it's relative to surroundings not absolute, the difference between the two.

Yes I did.

Abstract Distractions Reprise - But wait there's more!

A few of you have asked me to describe what the subject of these photos was. I'd argue that the subject doesn't/shouldn't really matter that much to the viewers EXCEPT when trying to explore how to find appropriate subjects for themselves.

So - here is the "grand reveal:"

1: This is a closeup (maybe 4 in or 10 cm across) of the rusted side of a piece of ancient logging equipment. I took the liberty of using a technique that I learned in the early days of this forum from Roel, called the Dutch Tilt. 👍

2: Another closeup, this time of the weathered plywood surface of a very old trailer.

3: This one is trickier. I suspect no one would ever guess it. Another closeup - this time looking at a very small piece of a broken headlight (If you are of a certain age, you may remember the old incandescent headlights with many facets.) This one was broken so that light could enter from behind, giving it the unearthly glow. I took the liberty to flip it upside down because I liked the way that the blue color seemed to run down into the yellow like it was melting.

4: Another shot of the same vehicle. This is a very small detail of a broken window glass from the side window of an old truck. The early safety glass in these vehicles had some sort of a petroleum-based inner layer to keep them from shattering. When the glass is broken and that layer is exposed to the elements, it creates these beautiful colors and patterns. You need to look at the glass very closely to find them. I rotated this one 90 degrees, creating what I see as a profile of a small child - a transparent alien boy, perhaps. What came to mind was the closing scenes of 2001 A Space Odyssey.

So what is the point? Things like this, and the other images from my other recent posts, are everywhere. If you have looked but haven't found anything, you just need to look closer. If you see something that catches your eye, find a good angle and shoot it! Maybe one in 10, or 20, will turn into something, but the discovery is magical.

Thanks for looking - and commenting!
-Mike

Bamberg

I am inspired by MikePDX's wonderful abstracts and am on the look out for subjects that hopefully can help me get images just close to Mike's amazing abstracts.

Looking at Mike's abstracts reminded me of when I dabbled in abstract images but not natural abstracts as Mike's are.

A few years ago I came across someone describing the Twirling Technique to create abstracts in post processing using any starter image.

Some starter images will work better that others and there are many variations of the twirling technique.

You can create Actions or Scripts (using Javascript) in both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements to output the twirl images using your inputted starter image.

Anyway, for anyone interested in this type of abstracts below are a few examples of when I dabbled in the technique a few years ago.

This is the starter image of the first example:

This is the final abstract I came up with for the above starter image.

Below are two more examples of the technique from different starter images.

This version looks better on my screen.

These are wonderfully mind-bending. A kaleidoscopic feast. Somehow Timothy Leary came to mind. 😄

Some people might define abstract to be completely subjective - that is the "original" object is not discernible. This leaves the viewer to inject his or her own subjective meaning. I'm more inclined to say that abstract photography (maybe all abstract art) exists somewhere on a spectrum from fully objective to fully subjective. These are clearly on the extreme subjective end of that spectrum, while mine are somewhat less so. They both have a place, and they both have value.

A general comment and apology.
So much this week is so good. Congrats to everyone on the quality of the images and discussion this week. Unfortunately, I'm between destinations and don't have the time to respond. Heartfelt agreement with MikePDX. Flat thread view makes good discussion here difficult and time consuming.